Colour Image Printing - Quality?

Can't think where else to ask this question as none of the other forums are as productive as Discussion.Apple
My colour printing to a Canon MP560 is like mud. I have read through all Bruce Fraser's colour advice and checked my Photoshop colour settings / proofing colours and can't get the image to print anywhere near realistic. Any ideas anybody?
Thanks, Jim.

Hi, thanks for your replies. I have printed off some other images and they are resonably ok, so I think it is mostly an image based problem rather than colour settings. I have not cleaned the print heads nor checked alignment, however there is no misprinting other than the mud colouring, which is like no tonal range in the darks ie everything after 40% tone just gets inked at about 80% of each colour cartridge. I have printed from Preview as well and that is only slightly better though has far fewer options regarding choice over output. I am using proprietary ink and standard glossy paper. Bottom plate is not dirty.
In this instance I have resolved the problem by printing the image at smaller size on the A4 sheet to save ink and running the sheet through with four altered states of the image in order to find an acceptable result. But I don't intend to do that everytime I need an art print. It is rather hopeless - if you colour copy an image on the glass the printer gives an optimum print. But if you scan the same image on the glass then print it out the result is like chalk and cheese.

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C4180 poor print quality

I've had my c4180 for a couple of years without any problems but the image print quality is now starting to deteriorate. When printing images on normal paper I usually print at maximum dpi but the quality is quite poor with white lines across the images. I've tried cleaning the print cartridges many times but it makes no difference. I've taken out the colour cartridge and given it a clean as recommended but still no improvement. There is just under half of the colour ink left so it's not because I'm running low either.
It's looking like I will need to buy a new printer which I really didn't want to have to do as it works perfectly apart from this.
Can anyone suggest anything?
Thanks in advance.

43,
Ink has a limited life span. It is sad, I know. The ink in the printer may just be "old" beyond it's actual age.
I have an old J6480 that I use only occasionally -- it is such a good printer that I keep it in spite of the fact that I might have to change out the cartridges more frequently than when the unit actually runs out of ink.
You might change out the cartridges so you are not coating the insides of the printer with the old ink.
If you are not going to use the printer very often, it does seem to help to keep it stored in a cabinet: dark and enclosed where there is not an abundance of light, dust, dampness, or temperature differences. I keep the J6480 in a cabinet on the other side of the house and use it wirelessly about every six months.
You may have to re-run the cleaning operation a couple of times after you do change the ink; change out the cartridges, test, and then decide.
Click the Kudos Star!
It is a nice way to say “Thank You” for the help.
Although I strive to reflect HP's best practices, I do not work for HP.
Kind Regards,
Dragon-Fur

Poor Colour Print Quality using Canon Pixima 5000

Hi there.
I am printing to an IP5000 off the back of an airport form MBAir with iPhoto. THe colours on the printouts are completely washed out with either a heavy blue tinge (for dark photo's) or redish tinge for lighter photo's.
I have tried HP daily paper 190grm and Kodak, both suffer the same problem, so it feels like the settins or printer driver is at fault.. can anyone point me at a calibration exercise to improve this? or offer any advice?

Hello David,
I use the iP5200 at home for photo printing, which is a slightly later model to your iP5000. From the iPhoto print dialog open and the iP5000 set as the printer, I first select the paper type in the Presets menu, such as Photo Paper Plus Glossy II, which is a Canon 260gsm high gloss stock. Not sure which setting would be ideal for the papers you are using, especially given that the Preset (profiles) are based on Canon papers.
I then click Print to proceed to the normal print dialog and ensure the Color Matching menu is set to Canon Color Matching?
Also, I change to Quality & Media, ensure the media type menu showing the same paper selected in the previous Presets menu and then set the Print Quality to High?
Again, this procedure is for Canon stock. Using the Canon paper profiles may provide the unwanted results you are getting with the HP and Kodak papers, although I have used Kodak photo paper previously and the results have been okay.
If you cannot get a good result for your stock using the Canon paper profiles you may have to look at using ColorSync instead of Canon Color Matching. This would then require you to have an ICC profile for the paper you are using to ensure you get a reasonable result. Check the vendors web site for a profile for the papers you have. This will go a long way to helping you obtain an improved colour output.
Another suggestion would be to purchase a small amount of Canon photo paper. You could then print from iPhoto with the correct paper profile selected and see whether you are happy with the output. This would help determine if the paper is the cause of your current symptom.
Pahu

CS5 Best print quality using "Image" options ?

Hi.
I have recently upgraded CS5 from 32 bit to 64 using Windows 7. I am trying to maximise print qualty. But notice that "Image" menu only offers 8,16 and 32 bit. The menu is preselected to 8 bit (? Improted picture qualtiy) and if I reselect to 32 bit, I lose the option to print. Can you help me please? Nai

This has nothing to do with print quality. You seriously need to read the help and do a generic web search on print stuff...
Mylenium

Why are my identically coloured opaque images printing different colours? Is it a transparency issue

I have an object that is a plain white logo with a grey background - the file is a flattened psd file and has only the one layer.
when i place the logo into InDesign (CS5) onto a plain grey (the same colour as in the logo) background and print this simple combination, the grey background on the logo is a funny colour compared to that on the document background. they have the exact same RGB reference! they only appear different colours when printed; on screen they look great.
i thought that this was an issue with transparency and have tried playing around with having a transparent logo with no background and various transparancy flattener settings but nothings fixing the problem. the only thing that i managed to achieve was to make all of the grey one colour, but the funny coloured grey i was seeing just in the logo background!
when i go to window-output and check the flattener preview, i can see that i have no transparent objects whatsoever in my document.
any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated - its driving me MAD!
thanks,
becky

More to the point on this, I think, is that both RGB and CMYK values listed for any spot color are "best approximations" (many, perhaps most, spot colors have no good CMYK equivalent, and that would be true as well for some subset using RGB) using Pantone's unknown color space. Even in that space the probability of getting an actual match between the simulation and the true spot ink is close to zero. Using some other space makes things worse, and since there is no way to know the sapce in use at Pantone, you're kind of up the creek.
For CMYK converison you can do reasonably well by using the Ink manager to convert the spot to process and check the bok to Use Lab Values at the same time. For RGB, I have no idea how to come close, at all.

Print quality - good, bad or indifferent? Your opinions sought.

Here is the message I wanted to send (gremlins in my keyboard) :-)
Hi all,
Well I have followed some of the threads in this list and have seen quite a few comments about LR's print quality. As I am very happy with it I would be interested in finding out exactly what people don't like about the print module and the output quality.
Maybe I am happy with it because my lack of darkroom experience means I cannot seewhat could be better. Maybe it is because I inprt mainly in B&W with some toning or lith effect grain added. I don't know. I certainly don't print in full blown colour.
Just to provide some extra information I use a Mac with a 21 inch LCD screen that is calibrated using a gretagmacbeth "Huey", an Epson Photo R800 and a professionally created icc profile for, mainly, Hahemuhle Photo rag paper. A4 is the largest size I print on (for obvious reasons). LR manages the colour through the profile, print resolution is 360dpi and sharpening is High.
So the question remains what do others find wrong with their prints? Or is it just a case of having to find something to groan about?
I await your responses
Andrew.

I believe that what Morey was originally thinking was that ProPhoto RGB values were being sent to the printer, and the printer had no idea what to do with them. I quote Morey:
"Never the less, the user needs some way in LR to define what color space is sent to the printer when MBR is enabled. Today it is delivering ProPhotoRGB color space image regardless of the embedded color space..."
As per Andrew Rodney's comments above, I don't think this is valid. I very much doubt that a printer gets RGB values along with an embedded profile like ProPhoto RGB... essentially telling the printer 'here are the raw RGB values, and here's the color profile to interpret those RGB values, now you're on your own printer... go 'head and convert to the PCS and then to your CMYK space...'. Seems illogical. Seems much more logical that LAB values (as in the LAB values in the PCS) are sent to the printer, and then the printer profile (an output ICC profile) maps values from the PCS to the printer's CMYK values.
So, it doesn't matter what color space your image is in, as long as your printing software is doing the conversion from the embedded color profile to LAB.
That being said, I still can't get prints worth a damn from LR... they all come out dark and over-saturated. If they happened to come out dark and *under*-saturated, then I might also be 'fooled' into believing that the image looks like unconverted raw ProPhoto RGB chromaticity values (generally very dull)... but I don't think that's the issue at all.
There's either something wrong with the way LR and PS are using these printer profiles, or the printer profiles are just bad to begin with. I'm not ready to jump at either conclusion, though the fact that 'Managed by Printer' gives me prints that match my soft-proofed view in PS makes the printer profiles suspect. The fact that 'Managed by LR' OR 'Managed by Printer' BOTH give me the same colors in LR leads me to believe something's wrong with LR, simply because it's not the case in PS, and PS is a much more mature program than LR. Yes, I'm going out on a limb in making that comment :)
-Rishi

Print Quality HPCP 1215

Hello, anybody
all my prints come out darker than the image on the computer. Photo's or WORD in Colour.
I tried the printer settings but couldn't find a good solution. Can anybody give me a hint what and where to adjust?
Thanks,
Matthias

Hi there,
Could you provide the community with a little more information to help narrow troubleshooting? Can you give us a discription of what problems you have with print quality?
You can say thanks by clicking the Kudos Star in my post. If my post resolves your problem, please mark it as Accepted Solution so others can benefit too.

Poor Print Quality with Switch to Mac

I have just replaced a Windows PC with a MacBook Pro (running OSX Yosemite, Retina screen, Lightroom 5.6 & Photoshop Elements 11 installed). Printer is an Epson Stylus PX720WD. All latest firmware, drivers etc installed.
Problem is that the print quality using LR & PSE on the Mac is dreadful. The image looks way underexposed and there are blank white edges to dark objects against a light background.
Printing the same image on my wife's Windows PC (running PSE11) and using the same Epson gives perfect print quality.
The difference is evidently Mac vs Windows. (same image, same program, same printer)
On Mac (in the LR or PSE print menu), there are few options for paper type, print quality (DPI) etc. (In LR I only see the option to toggle '240 ppp' on or off)
Whereas in Windows I get multiple options for paper type and print resolution (up to 720 dpi).
Ultimately, my processing workflow is LR on Mac, and I want to get them playing nice with the printing (rather than being obliged to export my finished images to another Window PC for printing).
Any help or suggestions on how to resolve are very much appreciated

All adjustments to arrive at the final image (to be printed) are on the Mac with LR.
With LR I have tried both 'Managed by Printer' and 'Adobe RGB' (in the 'Colour Management' section. If I select 'Others' (Instead of the default Managed by Printer) I get a long list of options : Adobe RGB, Display, and a long list of various Nikon & Epson alternatives. So far I have only tried the Adobe RGB and it was actually worse).
In PSE I leave it as Managed by Printer. But get the very different menu options in Mac vs Win (strange!).
The monitor on the Win PC is low quality but the image looks ok (tone, colour). And the printed image looks perfect - exactly as it was finished on the Mac.

Print quality terrible, may not be the printer - how can I fix it?

I've been cleaning and replacing cartridges in my printer lots but no improvement of print quality, in fact a deteriation so that now only magenta and a tiny bit of black print. I just used someone else's printer and same problem (different colour error though) but printed using their computer and the printer is fine. Could there be something I need to change in my mac rather than from the printer to solve this?
I have a MacBook Pro 13" and my printer is HP 8600dn, which has worked fine for 2 years.
The second printer which I can't print on but does work from another computer is the Epson Stylus SX420W.
I've just put new HP cartridges in and it's claiming to have finished the yellow despite me not seeing any yellow being printed.
Can anyone help?? This is driving me crazy and I really need my printer! Thanks, Eve

There are alterate drivers in OS X for each of those printers. Try Generic PCL 6 for the HP and the Gutenprint driver for the Epson. - in other words, add the printer again, but select the alternate driver.

Print Quality Question

When using the J6400 series there are several ways to set print quality.... There is the button on the front of the machine as well as the printing shortcuts that show up under preferences when you click on print. Which selection over-rides the other and takes priority? I have several customized shortcuts that use fast-draft and black cartridge only. I'm hoping the button on the machine that always defaults to mid-level quality doesn't take priority over my customized settings.

Welcome to Apple Discussions
AppleWorks changes the resolution of all graphic formats except PICT to 72 dpi. There are a couple of things you can do improve the print quality of images.
1. Turn on Fractional Character widths in Preferences > General > Topic: Text. This is a text setting, but it does improve the print quality of images.
Open the image in Preview (32-bit) or GraphicConverter & Save As... a PICT to use in AppleWorks. PICT is generally the best format to use for inserting or pasting into AppleWorks.

Print quality.

HI all.
Is there any way to improve print quality on iPad?
The same photo on PC prints well via Phtoshop Elements to HP Photosmart AirPrint printer.
From the iPad 4, the colours are harsh and unnatural, and quality is generally poor.
Same problem on iPad 2.
CC.

Hello @Strander and welcome to the HP Forums
Just to clarify, are you getting these lines when printing from the Mac or when making a Copy/doing a Scan?
If it's when you're printing, please try the steps within this Fixing Print Quality Problems for the HP ENVY 5530 e-All-in-One and Deskjet Ink Advantage 4510 e-All... document and it should help get rid of anything unwanted.
If the lines are happening when Copying or Scanning, please get a paper towel with some water (or glass cleaner like Windex) and wipe down the glass. If you're not really sure where to focus your cleaning, just line the page up with the glass and see where the lines are and focus your cleaning there
Let me know how this goes for you!
Please click “Accept as Solution ” if you feel my post resolved your issue, as it will help others find the solution faster
Click the “Kudos Thumbs Up" on the right to say “Thanks” for helping!
**MissTeriLynn**
I work on behalf of HP

Print quality settings

Hi,
when I print from my ipad or ePrint, I cannot control the print quality settings. I want them to be only black and draft quality, which I can manually apply and set as default when I print from my Mac. How do I get that setting to also apply for ePrint and printing from mobile devices?
Thanks,
jjborje
This question was solved.
View Solution.

Hi there, the degree of control you have on print settings when printing from a mobile device depends on the method you are using to print and to some extent the content you're trying to print. I would recommend you use the ePrint mobile print app which you can download from iTunes. Using this app allows you set print settings including Draft and Normal modes as well as selecting Grayscale instead of colour. These options are available when you print web pages, documents or emails from within the app. If you print photos they will print in colour and default to photo media.
If you send emails with file attachments to the printers email address you have no control over print settings. Similarly using AirPrint does not all ow you much control over print settings.
Hope this information helps and post back with any more questions.
Best.
If my reply helped you, feel free to click on the Kudos button (hover over the "thumbs up").
If my reply solved your problem please click on the Accepted Solution button so other Forum users may benefit from viewing the post.
I am an HP employee.

Print quality issues

Hello
We are having print quality issue when printing PDF's to our Canon iR C2880/C3380 UFR II. This was the most recent print driver from canons website which was download about 6 weeks ago. version 2.9. At one time we were having other pring quality issues and we changed from the post script driver to the ufr ii which solved the problem at the time.
This past saturday we upgrade the operating systems on the systems in question and they are now running windows 7 64 bit with service pack 1 installed. image 1 is the orignal pdf that was printed with a 3rd party pdf printer(PDF Xchange view version 2.5) image 2 is the same document that was printed using acrobat reader 10.1.2
the options for the print were pretty much identical between the program. Print as image was not selected. 1 thing to note with the acrobat when print as image was selected there was a slight improvement in the print quality.
Any help would greatly be appreciated.
image 1
image2

Hi, nd a warm welcome to the forums!
Off the bat, it looks like maybe bad RAM/ROM in the Printer, or corrupt Font.
Can you have another Computer jook to it and print for a test?
Can you try Printing from Adobe Reader...
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
Can you in Preview, Save As a picture format for a test?

Print Quality problems

My print quality for Reds & Greens is coming out streaked. The blacks and blues are fine. I use HP ink cartridges anad keep them cleaned and aligned. But on the Alignment page the reds & greens are streaked and cannot be cognized. Could this be a print head problem ?

Hello novemberwolf,
Welcome to the HP Forums.
I see that you are having some printing issues when attempting to print in colour.
Please click on the following link on Fixing Print Quality Problems for the HP Officejet Pro 8600 e-All-in-One Printer Series.
If the troubleshooting does not help resolve your issue, I would then suggest calling HP's Technical Support to see about further options for you. If you are calling within North America, the number is 1-800-474-6836 and for all other regions, click here: click here.
Thanks for your time.
Click the “Kudos Thumbs Up" at the bottom of this post to say “Thanks” for helping!
Please click “Accept as Solution ” if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others find the solution.
W a t e r b o y 71
I work on behalf of HP

Print quality difference between iphoto and aperture...?

when ordering books, is there a print quality difference between using iPhoto and Aperture? or are they sent to the same lab?
it's possible i may have some setting wrong, but when i order a book using iphoto, i never really feel the quality is that great. it's good, i just feel it could be a lot better. the print quality sort of reminds me of newsprint, albeit high quality newsprint. similar sized prints made at home on my basic 3-in-1 printer look better.
thanks...

Previews are what you view on your display. When you import a photo into Aperture (and I'm pretty sure iPhoto as well), your computer automatically generates a preview for quick viewing. The original images are stored in your library, but it is the preview that you see.
In Aperture, you are able to set the size and quality of these previews. When sharing photos between Aperture and iPhoto, the process is as follows:
Let's say that your images are stored in Aperture, but you also want to be able to view them in iPhoto without taking up too much room on your hard drive. Essentially, if you were to import the originals into iPhoto as well, you would be storing two exact, yet separate copies of the same image on your hard drive. As you are aware, with large images (whether JPEG's, and especially RAW) this would put quite a tax on your storage capacity after not too long.
So, you have your images in one or the other (in this case Aperture), but you want to play around with them in iPhoto. What you can do, is open iPhoto, go to the File menu and then select, Show Aperture Library. This will open a window with all of the contents of your Aperture Library. You can then drag any images you want into iPhoto . The only thing is, you are not dragging the original JPEG's, but rather, the previews of those images. If you have those previews set to a lower quality (again for capacity concerns), you will only have lower quality and lower detailed images in iPhoto. These images might not be ideal, or even suitable for printing high quality prints. The previews that you generate in Aperture though can be adjusted to be extremely high quality with no size limits.
My thinking was that since you mentioned Aperture, it sounded like you had experience with working with it and with ordering a photo book through Aperture. I guess you were saying that you ordered via iPhoto, weren't happy with the quality and were wondering if Aperture created books were better.
Anyway, if this is the case, I cannot answer that for you. I have never ordered a book through Aperture. If the quality of your images is good, you should be able to get a decent product no matter where you order it from. There is not doubt that the materials used and the print shop that does the work makes a difference, but if your images are good, you should still get a decent product through iPhoto. Perhaps iPhoto isn't the way to go though if you have had poor experiences with them.
If you haven't used Aperture yet, I would highly recommend it though aside from the photo book aspect of this thread. It is a stellar product.
I hope this helps.
Message was edited by: macorin

Colour Image Printing - Quality?

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