Printing photos

[dhutch]

Im having a bit of mare tonight trying to get my printer to output a decent photo.
- The printer is a canon ip4000, now running on oem canon ink, after i thought that might be the problem.
- However photos are still coming out very soft/dark rather than crisp and bright like the origanal images.

I have a selection of glossy photo papers all bought based a combination of good reviews, and midrange pricing. However trying diffrent settings/papers/brightness is starting to get wastefull fast!

The photo comes out best yet just on 'normal paper' mode and highest, but theres a stack to choose from.
- Plain, photopaper pro, photopaper plus glossy, glossy photo paper, high res photo paper, other photo paper. And thats the half it might be!
- There also matte, doublesided, tshirt, envolope, printable cd. And on top of that, additional options such as 'vivid photo' 'image optermiser' and 'photo optimiser'. the list goes on and im just at a loss.

Any hits tips, anyone with a canon pixma?


Daniel

[andy_quantum]

I havent used that printer but I have something similar with my HP and standard HP photo paper. It dumps that much ink into the paper the photos come out quite dark when printed.

I've sharpened them in Paintshop to the best compromise I can get from it and come to accept that I'm not going to get a professional print out of a £100 printer no matter how hard I try

[Luca Brazzi]

I've got 5 Canon printers, including a few Pixmas.

Tab 1 - main
My settings are....for hi gloss paper...
Media type - photo paper plus glossy
Print quality - custom, then quality 3
Colour adjustment - manual, then...
-- Intensity +12 (vibrant for cars), or perhaps +2/+3 for people
Tab 2 - Page Setup
- borderless
Tab 3 - Stamp/Background
no changes
Tab 4 - Effects
Vivid photo (too much for skin tones)
Image optimiser
Photo optimiser

All other settings are default.
It works for me, let us know how you get on.

[dhutch]

I admit it is only a £100 printer, and i did buy it for a whole host of other reasons ontop of its ablity to print photos. Like it has a parallel port to be compateable with our ageing printserver, and its ablity to print cds, borderless, and duplex.
- However in the past it has put out some good photos, and if i could just get back to that it would be great!!

I dont think i used 'photo paper plus glossy' last night, so i'll have a go with that and the other settings you suggest tonight and see how that goes. Tweaking the intensity up on the colour adjust might be just what it needs.
- Most of my photos are of bright things. I was trying to print this shot last night.


- I had already edited the saturation/brightness up a bit, but it was coming out awfull! Will try again with increased knowlage.


Daniel

[TheCaseAce]

Yeah my epson always prints darker than expected. And people's faces have a sort of orangey pall to them. Part of it might be getting to know how your printer renders colours and compensating for that?

I don't know.

I also think you need to over-sharpen for printing - more than you would for a screen, usually. On a screen you would be able to see halos/oversharpening but on paper it's not as obvious. Give it a go anyway, eh?

[Road2Ruin]

The problem is not the printer as such but the way the screen displays the image to the way the printer prints it. You need to print off a colour chart and then adjust your monitor or graohics cards levels so that the image on the screen matches the printed picture. The save this setting so you can revert back to it at any time. Now when printing you can gaurantee the image will look then samew when printed as it does on the monitor. You may find that your problem is with the original image having a colour cast or poor lighting and you never knew due to the monitor distorting the image. Of course it could be a fault with the printer but the only way to check that is to try another printer.

Peter