I’m e-mailing photos captured on my cel phone in bitmap form to my computer and printing them out on grid paper on my HP deskjet 540 printer.
They all emerge WAY too dark. The paper’s practically soaking with moisture.
I’m doing this as a quick and dirty way of checking the proportions of what I paint (in oils, working from the photo, which I display on my monitor) so it’s not essential to my process, but I’d like not to be using up so much ink and to get clearer pictures that show where the lighter areas fall. (Now the darker areas are solid black, totally indistinguishable, and the lighter areas are pretty murky.)
Do I need to use a better camera, adjust the printer somehow, or what? Could the grid paper be screwing me up?
Cell phone cameras pretty much stink as digital cameras go. A few are made with a flash and better resolutions (number of pixels) but by and large they are bottom of the pile in quality when it comes to taking digital pictures.
In your case better lighting might help.
Also the paper definitely makes a difference. Some papers are too absorbent and thus allow colors to run into each other from an inkjet. If you care get inkjet specific paper. Also, how “white” the paper is can make a pretty noticable difference. Most white paper is not as white as you might think. There are papers made that are much whiter than “normal” paper and when held side-by-side the difference is obvious. Whiter paper makes for brighter pictures printed on them.
If you are using too much ink you might consider putting your printer into “Draft” mode. I do not know that this is an option with your printer but it is pretty common with many printers. When printing go into Preferences and see if such a selection exists. Draft mode makes for a lower quality picture but it also uses less ink and in your case may even help make for a better output.
Finally try image editing software. Using the editing software you can change the brightness of the photo. After fiddling some you may get a result that while not an excellent print suffices for your needs in this case.
Honestly I have no idea what your grid paper is but I will point out that paper specifically made for inkjet printers is what you want. It should say on the paper packaging. Other papers can be too absorbent or allow too much bleed or, in some cases, may not be absorbent enough and so on. For best results get paper made to work with the type of printer you are using.
How about adding the grid to the image before printing using a digital image editor such as Photoshop, The Gimp, or Paint.NET? The latter two programs are free.
Just make a grid template of the appropriate size and add it as a new layer to your image, either partially transparent or “additive”. This will allow you to make the grid any size you want without extra lines/boxes and then you can also use plain white paper or special photo paper designed for your printer.
Easiest solution I think would be using a paint program to adjust the image’s gamma. Maybe your printer has settings in the printer properties to increase brightness also (mine does, an HP 2210).
When I hit “print”, I press the “properties” button in the printer box. There, there’s a “color” tab, where I have sliders for saturation, brightness, and color tone.
I, too, am interested to know the answer to this question.
My guess is that your paper is the problem. Does the image look good on screen? Have you printed images recently on your HP 540? Did they look okay? What kind of paper did you use? Try using that paper on this image and see how it comes out. Does it look okay now? If so, the paper is your problem. But make sure first that the Paper/Quality is set to the approriate media.
Your print driver won’t have a brightness setting. That printer is pretty old and doesn’t have the “controllability” of newer machines. I had one of those years ago and remember that the “photo paper” setting puts out a lot of ink. Using the suggested draft or plain paper mode was correct as far as the printer goes.
In your image editing software try lightening the photo before printing. Others have mentioned various software packages so I’ll mention a favorite of mine: Irfanview. It’s small, quick, reads almost every major file format out there, and can make the adjustment you want, whether you want to brighten the image or change the gamma level (Image–>Enhance Colors).
Here’s a potential solution: print the grid on a transparency then lay that on top of the printed image. That’ll decouple the grid from the imaging paper so you can use a suitable paper for the photo.