@nancyparker wrote:
...But I also have a little issue, While printing on cardstock paper the printing employment is fine yet the hues are not quite the same as the genuine pictures. Any assistance would be exceptionally valued.
This is an expected issue with any printer. There are two main reasons that come to mind.
1) Computer monitors and printers have a "color gamut" -- this is the range all possible colors that the device is able to accurately reproduce. Computer monitors are back-lit ... producing their own light to make the image glow. Printers rely on the lights shining on the paper ... and is reflected back. If you go to an art gallery you'll see that they put quite a lot of fuss into the lighting. Printers that have more ink tanks can typically provide a wider color gamut (the PRO-10 has 10 tanks)
2) The inks being used will impact the color. Jose Rodriguez has a 3rd party ink brand that he likes, but he still uses Canon's OEM red ink tank because he says he has yet to find a 3rd party vendor that offers a red that works as well as Canon's.
You can improve color accuracy two ways...
One method is to make sure you are using a color profile made for your specific printer/ink/paper combination. Many of the better paper vendors on the market will create these color profiles and offer them as a download (often in their support area). But these profiles generally assume you are using OEM inks and not 3rd party inks.
Another method is to produce your own color profile. But this requires a piece of equipment... an X-Rite (these are the guys who own Pantone) makes a device called the i1Studio. It's nearly $500 ... but it will "profile" your display and your printer to help you create profiles for a more accurate color-managed workflow. BTW, the nearly $500 device is the "cheap" device ... if you'd like to spend a few thousand dollars... they have meters in that price range too.
If that sounds expensive... there are alternatives. "buying" a color profile device is great for those who use a lot of different papers and may need to create new color profiles more often. But suppose you've found your favorite paper or card stock and you just want a profile produced for that one favorite medium. There are online services that will produce the color profile for you -- at a cost -- but substantially less expensive than buying your own device. Essentially they have you download and print a special pattern image ... on whatever paper you want profiled. You mail them the results and they scan it. In other words... they own the calibration device and you own the printer and paper... so you "print" and they "scan" and they mail you back the results and you get a working color profile.
Even with a proper color profile designed for your specific printer/paper/ink ... you are still limited by color gamut. But the computer knows this. So the last step has to do with how the computer compensates for color gamut limits.
Some applications that are good at dealing with prints (e.g. Photoshop & Lightroom support this as does Canon's Print Studio Pro application that you can download and install for your PRO-10 (Canon provides that download at no charge since you own one of their printers) has a feature called Rendering Intent but this is often referred to as simply the "intent".
The "intent" is a place where you tell the software how to manage colors that are outside the color gamut of the printer. There are two major categories. These are Relative and Perceptual intents.
Perceptual is the one that most people will probably prefer. Here's the difference ... and why.
Relative is the easier one to understand... in this intent, any in-gamut colors will be printed as the actual in-gamut color (that's simple enough). No changes are made to in-gamut colors. Out-of-gamut colors will be shifted to the nearest in-gamut color. That also sounds simple enough. This intent produce the most accurate color rending possible for your printer.
So if the Relative intent is the most accurate ... why not just use this all the time? What's the point of having anything else?
There's a problem. Suppose you have a photo with several similar hues (suppose they are reds) and some of these reds are "in gamut" and some of them are "out of gamut". But you notice the differences when you view the photo on any device that can produce the entire gamut. Now you print the photo using Relative intent. All the out-of-gamut colors are shifted to the nearest in-gamut colors... but those new colors are the SAME colors as the colors that were ALREADY in-gamut colors. And this means you can't actually tell the difference in hues. Suddenly an area that had some detail has gone flat with everything simply being the same color.
This is where Perceptual comes in. This is the rendering intent meant to retain our ablity to perceive the differenes.
In Perceptual ... all out-of-gamut colors are shifted to the nearest in-gamut colors. BUT... if those new in-gamut colors happen to match colors that were already in-gamut, then those original in-gamut colors will ALSO be shifted to maintain the perceptual relationship between the hues. This means that the printer isn't necessarily representing every color as accurately as possible... but it IS maintaining the ability to notice that there are supposed to be differences in each of the hues. It is basically squeezing the color gamut required by your print to fit in the color gamut possible by your printer.
Tim Campbell
5D III, 5D IV, 60Da
