Brightness problems Pixma 9500 Mark II

[jampf]

Trying to figure out how to print the brightness of what I see on the monitor. Running a windows 8 box with current Adobe creative cloud account. Trying to print directly from lightroom. Have a colormunki display and have calibrated the monitor which helped a bunch. Also turned off the color adjustments in the printer settings. Currently the monitor brightness is set to 0 (by the munki). Am printing on a canon pixma 9500 mkII and my printer drivers are up to date.. This is not just me being picky it is just plain off. Am printing on Moab Lasal Matte and/or Moab Pearl metallic and am also using the correct icc profile for it. If I raise the exposure to see the darker areas, my colors wash out. If I print where my calibration tells me to, the prints are too dark. Am having issues finding a middle ground. Even tried to raise the print adjustment brightness with no difference. With all that I have done and spent, I really feel like I should have better results. Can someone help?

[ebiggs1]

This is a tricky subject. It comes up all the time. But here goes.

Make sure, I mean darn sure, you have color management turned off in the printer. Not just, I think I did. There may be more than one setting to accomplish this. It is done in the Canon software.

You do not need any add-ons like color monkeys or the such. The most critical settings for your monitor are, brightness, contrast and gray-scale. Get these right and the rest will likely fall in place.

A fact, you can not correct for every color there is at the same time. You will pull your hair out trying to do this. This requires you decide which is the most important and most folks go for skin tones.

It is my thought that LR does not print as well as PS does. So I use PS for printing although I start in LR.  Also get some Canon Pro Platinum paper and get it to print correctly first. Then venture out into other papers. Make sure you set the profile for it.  Remember, Canon printers seem to have a warm bias, slightly reddish.  It is a characteristic of the 9500 II.

Canon ink and Canon paper make initial set-up much easier because it eliminates variables.  Canon ink is mandatory.

Monitors age and right now I usually add ½ to 1 stop brightness in PS to my prints because I am aware the monitor is showing slightly brighter than the printer is printing.

Let me know how it goes.

[jampf]

Thanks for the reply. I had already turned off the printers color management. It was a bit hidden but I found it This helped a bunch. I did already get this brightness issue worked out. That being said, I will look into some of your suggestions. The two biggest things that helped me get over the hump were luminance and monitor tilt. Turning down the lum to 90 from 120 made a huge difference. It really brought me very close to where I wanted to be. What took me over the edge was looking at my monitor from the correct angle. It may be simple but it worked. After getting everything set up the way it should be and getting the prints close in brightness, I simply tilted my monitor back until it looked like my last print and noted how I sat and the monitor angle. Final adjustments were made in LR at the new monitor angle and a **bleep** near perfect print came out. Again, thanks for replying and giving good info.

[ebiggs1]

You bring up a very good point that most people miss.  There is a huge difference between printed color and color from a light source.  Light and pigment, very different things.

Glad it worked out for you.