Printer/Multifunction Support

[leesher]

You just saved my printer, thank you so much Bucktoof, you are a true Christmas Angel.  I hope you have an amazing rest of the holidays, and thank you more than I can say.

[BurnUnit · Accepted solution]

Though it's generally cheaper to have your pics commercially printed, I still enjoy seeing a well made image come out of my own printer at home. It's kind of like having your own color darkroom at home. But like anything associated with photography there is a learning curve.

What you have to keep in mind is that your camera sees colors in one way, your monitor sees them in another way and your printer may try to interpret them in a third way. Since you mentioned using PSP for editing, this link from Corel shows a fairly simple explanation of what's involved.

http://www.corel.com/content/vpk/pspx_pspa6/PSPX_Color_Management.pdf

If you were doing editing for commercial printing you'd want to do the hardware calibration of your monitor and the hardware can be kind of spendy. But for making inkjet prints at home a software monitor profile will usually be sufficient. And you likely already have the software you need to create your monitor profile.

Beyond that you may also have to change some settings in your editing and printer preference menus so they'll know to use the newly generated monitor profile.

[leesher]

Thank you, BurnUnit, I'm reading the link now, I really appreciate your help!!

[BurnUnit]

I think, in general, that the adjustment sliders in the printer drivers should be consider as more of a way of making fine adjustments or tweaking the printer output. If you're having to make major changes to adjust brightness, contrast, saturation and color corrections, there's probably a bigger problem in hiding somewhere else. Like not having a good basic monitor profile, or software that's trying to work in the wrong color space, or a printer that's using (or not using) an ICC color profile when it shouldn't (or should).