Printing from Aperture photos are too dark and not quite true to color

[weazle1098]

So… Basically if I really like a photo and I want it printed I send it off through Aperture to Apples print services and its all good, but recently I've had to have these "Image Presentations" for class and I don't have the time to send them off and printed and sent back. So I've been relying on my Canon MP130 printer which doesn't seem to do anything justice. I have calibrated my monitor using the utility that Apple ships with Mac OS X and I've tried with the printer settings to have no color corection. I do have the colorsync profile system managed though, but I have no idea if I should change that or not. After playing with the utilities for a while I'm sort of lost on what to do.

ei. this is the photo I really wanted to print http://www.flickr.com/photos/weazle1098/1515689265/

Thanks!

 

[stoid]

You aren't going to get color accuracy from a cheap inkjet printer. We use $8000 Xerox Phaser laserjet printers at work, and we don't even get the greatest color accuracy. If you want something that is going to look good, especially for a dark shot like that you are going to need to use something like the FujiFilm Pictrography technology that laser exposes, thermally develops, and uses a dye-transfer process. For my photography classes, the school had a FujiFilm printer, but most Wal-Mart/Walgreen's places that let you print your digital pictures use similar technology. I don't mean the instant print kiosk, I mean the wait an hour booth. It may seem expensive, but compared to the price of inkjet cartridges (and how fast night shots would use them up) it's probably no more than you are paying for a print now.

 

[seenew]

You CAN get good images from an inkjet printer. It's all in the color management and paper you use.

You need to set the image's color profile to that of your printer. The profile should be installed on your computer already, so you shouldn't have to hunt for it. I don't have Aperture, so I couldn't tell you how to do it in there, but in Photoshop CS3 you go to File>Print...

and you will see options to the right, a preview on the left. In the drop down menu in the upper right of the new window make sure it's in Color Management and not Output.

For the option that says Color Handling, set it to Photoshop Manages Colors.
For the option that says Printer Profile, select your printer's profile for the type of paper you want to use (you can see the preview image change). Lastly set your rendering intent to either Perceptual or Relative Colorimetric.

that should help. we just had a very long and boring lecture in my color photo class on digital color management, which was a waste of time for me since I'm shooting only film at the moment!

But I'm glad I could help someone with the info.

 

[weazle1098]

You CAN get good images from an inkjet printer. It's all in the color management and paper you use.

You need to set the image's color profile to that of your printer. The profile should be installed on your computer already, so you shouldn't have to hunt for it. I don't have Aperture, so I couldn't tell you how to do it in there, but in Photoshop CS3 you go to File>Print...

and you will see options to the right, a preview on the left. In the drop down menu in the upper right of the new window make sure it's in Color Management and not Output.

For the option that says Color Handling, set it to Photoshop Manages Colors.
For the option that says Printer Profile, select your printer's profile for the type of paper you want to use (you can see the preview image change). Lastly set your rendering intent to either Perceptual or Relative Colorimetric.

that should help. we just had a very long and boring lecture in my color photo class on digital color management, which was a waste of time for me since I'm shooting only film at the moment!

But I'm glad I could help someone with the info.

Thanks a lot, that would fairly well, at least I can see a lot more, the black is still not right, but black is a pain in the rear anyway, the only think I couldn't find was the "Option for color handling," It wasn't in the print dialogue box. But thanks a bunch.

 

[Mantat]

look at this thread:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1052957&tstart=0

 

[ccj]

fixed!

OS X 10.5.3 update fixes this problem for me