Editing/Printing

Hi, I am new to Photography (been taking pictures for 50 years) and need basic help. I took some ocean sunrise pictures that I feel turned out ok, but my editing or printing is not adiquate to get a good print. I only have Adobe Photoshope or Windows Live Photo Gallery to do basic editing, and get a suitable image on my monitor. When I try to print, the results are not very good. My printer is a Canon Inkjet PIXMA iP6000D. The Results are probibly best described as washed out? or having a yellowish over tint? Is there a setting I'm missing, or is the software or hardware completely inadequate. I am not looking for professional results, but would like to be able to print what I see on my monitor. Any and all help and advise is greatly appreciated. Trying to attach one of the pictures, hope it works

My Canon inkjet printer is also a struggle. In most cases I need to come up with a custom tone curve for each print. In the worst cases I use masking to create an adjustment layer for the problem areas of the image. This is all very time consuming, at this point I think I am on my last Canon printer, will take a serious look at other printer brands soon.

Kelly Cook

Printing requires it's own skill set. If color accuracy and quality prints are desired it's never just a push of a button or changing a setting. You will need to invest time to study and practice if you want to make your own high quality, color accurate, ink-jet prints.

The process of going from monitor to print is complicated, and there could be many places where mistakes are being made. Start by studying "color management". That will help you sort out your problems.

If you don't want to deal with that then find a good photofinishing lab. They can help you get great prints, and in the long run they are probably cheaper than doing it yourself.

As for color management, I have a Sypder 3 calibration unit for my monitor. Would I need to buy yet another device for prints?

Kelly

I have a Canon Pixma (don't know the model offhand, takes 6 cartridges) which isn't considered a pro printer but I'm getting some nice results printing my own photos in either 4x6, 8x10 or 8 1/2x11" size.

I set mine in Photoshop to choose color management from the computer, not the printer. That seems to work much better (since apparently the printer isn't programmed to do much beyond squirting ink on paper). I usually print in Working RGB but sometimes print CMYK if I want a warmer or cooler tone (with skies etc.).

I don't do much editing except sometimes to crop or lighten, especially shooting RAW (DNG) and manual where I can control the settings; maybe how you edit can make it trickier to print. I experimented with a sunset photo I took this summer where I was losing light, and let's just say the editing turned into an experiment gone awry! Usually I find that what I have in camera and onscreen is pretty much what I end up with printed.

Fair point on the print management. With Digital Photo Professional I did try the program's management, which made very little difference. After giving up on that, switched to Elements 9 and just left it in the printer's management. Next time I will look more into the print options in Elements.

Color issues are so small that I can fairly easily fix those with editing tweaks. My #1 issue has been tones. I can get nice deep blacks while still showing plenty of shadow detail on my monitor. But in printing the shadows block in. Of course dialing the contrast way back can recover the shadows, but then the blacks grey out. Maybe one of the Adobe settings will fix that, next time.

road kill

SeaJay,

Are you calibrating your monitor with a hardware device? I see comments that say printing is difficult and I have to disagree with that as long as you are in a known neutral state to start which is what calibrating your display does.

I currently am artist in residence for an inkjet paper company but I promise this answer comes from Bryan the photographer . I'm going to explain why calibrating your display is so important.

Imagine going to your local electronics store and looking at a wall of TV's all set to the same channel. I'm sure you've seen something like that in the past and you probably noticed that the color varied from tv to tv and so did sharpness and clarity. Most people look for the tv with the best picture they can afford but how do you know what colors the tv stations are sending? Just because the tv is set to give a pleasing tone, what if the person sending the signal didn't mean for you to see a pleasing tone and was showing grey weather.

Calibrating with a hardware device (it takes about 5 minutes every couple weeks for LCD) allows you to set your monitor to a known neutral space so that everything you view from then on is correct on your display. It is only then that you should say something is off because at that point you know your monitor is correct so you can safely say prints are off. If you are not calibrated then likely it is your monitor that is off and your printer is printing correctly but you don't know what correct is for your display. Make sense? I used to teach color management and I would demonstrate this by making an images colors way off, I would then go to my monitor and adjust colors with monitor controls to make the image look good on screen. This allowed me to show an image that looked good but when I printed it the results were horrible as expected.

Unfortunately the people who sell computers rarely know color management and they don't inform the customers. It is important to use a hardware device to measure and not something you look at and make a judgement call using sliders because we all see color differently and women see more color than men (no fair) so using a non biased hardware device is the only safe bet and the good news is that you can get them for @ $100 and up and any device these days is pretty good. You want a hardware colorimeter and here's a link to one that's inexpensive and has a good reputation: www.adorama.com/ICVS4X100.html?gclid=CMeJs9PmwrICFYaDQgodzmgA6w . The most popular for pro's is the ColorMunki or Eye-One Display but ANY current product will do a good job.

Once your display is calibrated you should get great results and if not, you at least know that the problem is with your profile, but don't worry about that for now because once you calibrate and look at the same image I'll be you notice the image itself needs adjustment. BTW, don't be scared to calibrate. When I demonstrated calibration in front of large professional photo groups I would always pick on a pc person who hadn't calibrated anything ever to do so on my mac which more often than not people had never touched before. No one likes looking like a fool in front of a live audience so luckily every time I did this it was easy for the person and demonstrated anyone could do it. All the current software that comes with the devices uses on screen wizards so no need even to read a manual.

KCook mentioned using Digital Photo Pro's calibration and that just isn't good enough because it's subjective as I stated about why hardware calibration is a must. You only need to calibrate an LCD once every 2 weeks and the reality is it can be far less often so it's not a pain in the butt or something that will slow you down.

If you get calibrated let me know. Your printer is fine don't buy anything but a colorimeter and of course some of our paper . Get calibrated with hardware and then get in touch with me if you still have issues. It really is easy and nothing is cooler than seeing your print come out and looking fantastic.

Henry, I'm sorry if you've had bad print experiences but I have to politely disagree with your comments. . I've been doing my own printing for well over a decade and I can't remember the last time I had to reprint something because I didn't get a good quality print. I have nothing against labs whatsover but the FACT is that inkjet printers surpassed MiniLabs for quality several years ago and there are so many more surface types available for inkjet than minilabs. In fact many labs are going to inkjet based lab printers.

Most of today's printers do full bleed at common photo sizes as well so you don't have to trim prints or anything. The drivers that come with photoshop for the past 3 or 4 years have gotten better and you don't have to set a bunch of stuff with each print and the current driver remembers your last settings. There are also rip products that remember your settings but even if you don't have the latest photoshop or a rip there are only a couple places you need to check. If you are not sure of what settings to use for your combination of software and printer then do a search on the internet for say "Printing to canon IPF9000 using PC Photoshop" and you'll get results for screen shots or video or both.

I have paper on my shelf in my studio with several surface types from metallic gold and metallic silver to canvas etc. and my prints come out looking fantastic every time. You MUST calibrate your display, but today there really is no need to get a hardware device to make printer profiles. Paper companies like the one I now work with provide them for free or you can have them made for you inexpensively and many papers work great with the manufacturers original profiles. As an example, the following papers we make work great with std Luster profiles (Premium Glossy, Premium Luster, Premium Pearl, Metallic Pearl, Metallic Silver, Metallic Gold).

Make sure you calibrate your display by following your software's onscreen instructions and then if you have problems, let me know.

Happy Printing!!!

I have Elements and the default was set for the printer to manage the color etc. It made a big difference once I figured out to reset it so Photoshop controls the color management.

I hadn't looked at your photos in some time but looking at your Zenfolio you have some good pictures, I would imagine they'd make nice prints. I don't do enough processing to know if that makes much difference in how a photo prints out or if it would be more the printer settings that affect how your images look when printed.