Slightly OT: Colour Profiling on the cheap?

Bastet wrote:

I guess the answer to the above’s "no" but I thought I’d ask anyway. After spending practically every penny I have on a printer and Photoshop spending

Mike Russell wrote:

Bastet wrote:

I guess the answer to the above’s "no" but I thought I’d ask anyway. After spending practically every penny I have on a printer and Photoshop spending

Mike Russell wrote:

Bastet wrote:

I guess the answer to the above’s "no" but I thought I’d ask anyway. After spending practically every penny I have on a printer and Photoshop spending £100s on profiling hard/software. Adobe Gamma didn’t do it – my prints have an obvious yellow cast – on whatever media I choose to use…

Monitor: – Sony G520 (couldn’t afford the model with the EyeOne kit) Printer: – Canon i9100
Scanner: – Epson 1200P (yes, I know, but I can’t afford to replace it) OS: – Windows XP Pro
Graphics Card: Radeon 9700 Pro

I’m well aware that proper profiling costs mega-money, but there must be a reasonable compromise. I use PS primarily for its art effects and the photo of pink roses I finished working on today (it’s a get well card for my grandmother) printed out almost sepia on 210g/m" (sorry I don’t know what that is in Americanese) matte inkjet card (probably not a very good brand – EuroJet – but it was the only company I could find selling something heavier than 160g/m"). The leaves weren’t a bad colour – but you wouldn’t have known that the flowers were pink!

I’ve wasted nearly half the cartridges on this and I really don’t want to print again unless I can be fairly sure of the results.
Could someone offer me some suggestions? If I can get this right, there could be some money in it as Grandpa could get me commissions from the Rose Society.

Bastet – more than likely the bottleneck is with your scanner.

I disagree. If the problem is the scanner, then the yellow cast should also be visible on the monitor (unless the monitor settings are really way too blue). So if the image looks good on the monitor and you have used Adobe Gamma to calibrate the monitor, then it’s more likely the printer settings. Bastet, you use a lot of words, but you give very little real information. How do you print? Some people convert to CMYK, because they think that is needed as a printer uses CMYK inks. The Canon printer driver expexts RGB data however, and converting to CMYK causes a color cast. That could be the problem, for example.

Give information that matters, like settings of Photoshop and your printer driver. The brand of your scanner or your graphics card isn’t your problem. With a Canon i900 you should be able to print something that is close to what you see on your monitor, no matter what brand of scanner you used.

—
Johan W. Elzenga johan<<at>>johanfoto.nl Editor / Photographer http://www.johanfoto.nl/

In article <bpm50m$2rj$>,
"Bastet" wrote:

I guess the answer to the above’s "no" but I thought I’d ask anyway. After spending practically every penny I have on a printer and Photoshop spending

Johan W. Elzenga wrote:

Mike Russell wrote:

Bastet wrote:

I guess the answer to the above’s "no" but I thought I’d ask anyway. After spending practically every penny I have on a printer and Photoshop spending

Elmo P. Shagnasty wrote:

In article <bpm50m$2rj$>,
"Bastet" wrote:

I guess the answer to the above’s "no" but I thought I’d ask anyway. After spending practically every penny I have on a printer and Photoshop spending

Bastet wrote:

Whoops – that’s me all over – *FAR* too verbose! OK, I’m not sure if the printer has an sRGB setting (I’ve not found one – my old ESP895 did) the settings under ‘advanced colour options’ are ‘manual colour balance’, ‘Intensity’ and ‘enable ICM’ – the settings of which made very little difference.

I am not using Canon paper – I’ve got too much Epson in the cupboard which I cannot justify wasting.

You make every effort to make life more complicated. Using Epson paper in a Canon printer adds one more variable and makes it more difficult to get the colors right. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it is better to try to get a good result on Canon paper first, and THEN experiment with other paper.

The brightness settings don’t appear to do anything
either. I calibrated the monitor using AG, and am using the resulting profile (the white point is 6500°K).

Where do you use it? You should use it as your monitor profile (AG automatically sets it that way), but you should NOT use it as your working color space in Photoshop. Many people make that mistake. Choose sRGB for your color space in Photoshop.

The monitor has an sRGB setting, but that hasn’t made a difference either (it did with my old printer)

The picture in question hasn’t been scanned (it was from a photo CD).

Well, that proves beyond any doubt that it isn’t your scanner! 😉

One other (maybe vital) piece of information is that I am *NOT* printing from PS – the image is being exported to MS Publisher 2003. Would this make an appreciable difference?

Yes, absolutely. Photoshop ‘tags’ the image with a color profile, which tells other programs which color space to use. However, not many other programs understand color profiles. They open the image in sRGB (or something close), no matter what the profile says. I don’t know MS Publisher, but it would not surprise me a bit if that program doesn’t work with color profiles. This can cause a serious color shift if the profile wasn’t sRGB. Try printing from Photoshop to see if the results are better.

My suggestion: Follow the setup that Mike suggested. Then print something from Photoshop first and print it on Canon paper. If that looks OK, start experimenting with other papers and/or printing from other programs.

—
Johan W. Elzenga johan<<at>>johanfoto.nl Editor / Photographer http://www.johanfoto.nl/

Bastet wrote:

I guess the answer to the above’s "no" but I thought I’d ask anyway. After spending practically every penny I have on a printer and Photoshop spending £100s on profiling hard/software. Adobe Gamma didn’t do it – my prints have an obvious yellow cast – on whatever media I choose to use…
Monitor: – Sony G520 (couldn’t afford the model with the EyeOne kit) Printer: – Canon i9100
Scanner: – Epson 1200P (yes, I know, but I can’t afford to replace it) OS: – Windows XP Pro
Graphics Card: Radeon 9700 Pro

I’m well aware that proper profiling costs mega-money, but there must be a reasonable compromise. I use PS primarily for its art effects and the photo of pink roses I finished working on today (it’s a get well card for my grandmother) printed out almost sepia on 210g/m² (sorry I don’t know what that is in Americanese) matte inkjet card (probably not a very good brand – EuroJet – but it was the only company I could find selling something heavier than 160g/m²). The leaves weren’t a bad colour – but you wouldn’t have known that the flowers were pink!

I’ve wasted nearly half the cartridges on this and I really don’t want to print again unless I can be fairly sure of the results.

Could someone offer me some suggestions? If I can get this right, there could be some money in it as Grandpa could get me commissions from the Rose Society.

Thanks folks!

This page may help you a lot:
http://www.normankoren.com/makingfineprints.html

You can stick with the simple stuff that it explains. You will have to make a couple of test prints. Once you have satisfactory results with one type of paper in your printer save that printer profile. You’ll probably have to create different profiles for each different type of paper you use, but you don’t have to create them all at once. Get the card for Grandma working first.

I’d suggest doing your test prints from Photoshop. I don’t know if Publisher is making things worse, but it won’t make things better.

Bernie