On Sat, 25 Nov 2006 08:19:03 -0800, wrote:
Yes I did run adobe gamma. In fact I ran it before I read Ian’s article. But I ran it again anyway because it still didn’t change anything. (as far as the end result goes anyway). It must be somewhere in the communication of between the printer and something. Some pictures come out perfect with hardly any tweaking at all, and others seem like they’ll never work out. Especially when it involves red and yellow somewhat mixed together. The red over powers the yellow tremendously. With some of them it’s just hit and miss I guess. But it’s costing me all my ink and paper
Thanks for the advise.
Also, for the comment about the Nasa guys. Is that for real? I’ll keep working on it and let you know if something works out. Thanks again, Bob
Hi Bob. First, do a printer test. You printer should have a print test page function, so try that. It is possible that one of the ink cartridges is filled with the wrong ink.
I had that happen to me once with an HP cartridge. I was printing numerous copies of the same picture when one of my cartridges ran out. I installed a new one, and began the printing again. The first print looked terrible, so I checked my settings and printed another copy with the same result.
I played around for a few minutes, but I couldn’t find anything wrong, so I printed a test copy to make sure all the nozzles were working. The test print looked okay at first, but then I realized that although all the nozzles were firing okay, they were supposed to be red….blue….yellow….black. What I got was
red….purple….yellow….black. Apparently the blue chamber of the cartridge became contaminated with red (most likely during the fill cycle at the factory), so that the two colors of red and blue made a purple shade. I replaced the cartridge and all was fine. Once you’ve determined that the cartridges are okay, the next thing is to calibrate your monitor, then calibrate your printer. As others have said, you can do a reasonable job calibrating your monitor using Adobe’s Gamma. You said that you did run Adobe Gamma, so if you did it correctly, then most likely your monitor is calibrated. The only other thing you can do to calibrate it is to use a colorimeter, like the Spyder 2. That will do a very nice job of calibrating it for you.
The next thing is to calibrate your printer. The easiest way I’ve found to do that is to have a profile made by a third party. I have used Cathy’s Profiles several times and have been very pleased with the results. She only charges $40 per profile, so it’s not that expensive, unless you need a lot of profiles. Her site is at
http://www.cathysprofiles.com She’s not the only place that does this, so you can check around if you’d rather use someone else. It sounds to me like the printer profile is the problem, since you seem to have the monitor calibrated. If you do use Cathy’s Profiles, you can get an idea if it is the printer’s profiles, since you need to download her color targets, then print them out . You do this using her instructions, then send the printouts to her with your $40. The thing is, once you’ve downloaded the targets and printed them out, you can just compare the targets onscreen with the printouts, and you will see if there are any mismatches in the two. Downloading the targets is free, so you might try that to see what happens.
Anyway, good luck on correcting the problem, and when you do find out what it was, drop us a note here so we’ll know what it was.
Talker
