I scanned some slides for a friend of the family. Viewing them on the PC screen the colors look fine.
I tried printing them to my Canon IP3000 on Canon Photo Glossy Plus paper and he colors are lighter than on the screen.
How do I make the printouts match the screen or as close as I can. I’m using the Microsoft Photo application that is in XP to print
Well, there’s a lot of different possibilities here, but first, are you sure you are choosing all the correct options in the Canon print driver? Unfortunately, I don’t know what the ip3000 print driver looks like, but you should have options for color management there. Make sure you have the printer set to the correct type of paper “Premium Photo Glossy” or its equivalent, and check the color settings.
Another possibility is that your monitor isn’t calibrated correctly. It may be displaying brighter or darker than it really should. You can always adjust your monitor until it matches the print, and then you can bring the print down in your photo application, print it, and hope it matches then. This solution is a bit of a hack, though.
For reference, the proper way to doing this is to calibrate your monitor using a hardware tool like Monaco Optix, load individual paper profiles into your photo editing software, have your photo editing software do all the color management (instead of your printer), but I don’t think you can do this with the Microsoft Photo app that comes with XP.
Technically, the way to do that is to calibrate your monitor, and better still to calibrate the monitor AND printer so they work with each other.
The easy way is just to figure out what the problem is and (over) correct it. If the colors are printing out lighter (assume your ink is full) would be to load the pictures into an editing program and darken/saturate them.
If might be easier still to take them to Sams/Walmart/Walgreens etc and have them printed.
You’ve got saturation and contrast controls in that program, right? And brightness contrast controls on your monitor?
This is one way to do it:
Take one of your crummy looking prints and hold it next to the monitor.
Adjust your monitor’s brightness and contrast to give you the best match between the print and the image on screen.
Put down the print, and use the photo application settings to get the picture on the monitor looking the way you want it.
Print the picture. It should look good.
Now you can set your monitor back to wherever you had it.
The picture will probably look overly bright and contrasty.
Look at it, then bring up a new picture, and use the software to give it a look similar to that first bright, contrasty picture.
Then print the new picture.
It too should look fine.
Once you get a feel for the difference between your monitor and the printer it should become almost automatic for you to add the correct color and contrast changes, before you print.
I don’t believe it is a monitor calibration issue because on my desktop and laptop I have the same color level displayed. I have set it to Premium Photo Glossy. I’m going to install the light version of Image Ready by Adobe I received with the laptop and see if that helps.
I am not using Canon ink so that may be the problem.
Not using Canon inks can indeed be the problem.
Color management is not a trivial issue–to be honest, it can be quite a bitch. Every single paper I use has its own custom profile (separate from the “Premium Photo”-type setting) that I use. I have to calibrate my monitor every three to six months to maintain accuracy. And even then, there’s slight variations between my monitors and the prints.
Are there no manual settings in your print driver? My Epson driver, for example, lets me adjust the gamma, the profiles, and gives me three color management settings: One with settings for individual inks/contrast/brightness, another that is a printer-managed color setting (where the printer guesses what will make the closest match), and a third which turns off all printer color management (leaving it to your software to make those decisions). I would assume the Canon driver must have some level of adjustments available.
There are manual settings I can explore but I think I’ll pay a professional to do these to save my time. One of them need adjustments that I can’t do.
Dingdingdingdingdingdingdingdingding!!!
Never use third-party inks if your work is color-critical.
Easiest possible fix:
Find the saturation controls on your printing or viewing program.
Adjust the saturation up about 40 or 45 points.
Print again.
Voila!