Photoshop Print Colour Major Issues

[ratboyab]

Hi all,

I recently purchased a new printer (a Brother MFC-J5910DW all-in-one wireless A3 I believe) and when I print from Photoshop, the colours / image comes out awful and I mean that bad that I spent a long time playing with cleaning the ink cartridges on the printer as I thought it was a blocked cartrdige. It was only after I printed directly from the windows explorer that I discovered it was Photoshop that was the issue.

I tried playing around with the colour management (between "printer manages colour" & "photoshop manages colours" and played with the individual settings. I also tried playing with the colour settings through "Edit>Colour Settings" & tried a few different options in there and it seemed to make no difference. I tried saving the PSD as a JPEG and re-opening then printing and again no difference. I also tried opening the same JPEG in Serif Photoplus and that printed perfectly.

I've seen a lot of disscussions about prints not matching screen colours which I understand but haven't found anything like this. The images below demonstrate what I am referring to, they are scans of the prints. Excuse the bits of writing / print on the images, these were test copies just done at low quality on pre-used paper just to make sure my mother was happy with the layout (I did also try printing in high quality aswell and his made no difference).

 

[hawkeye]

I'm not saying this is the total problem but, the review of this printer from PC Mag. states: "Photo output was unusually poor for an inkjet. I'd peg the quality at slightly below the worst you'd expect from drugstore prints."

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2396662,00.asp

 

[Steve]

Here's what you should do when printing in PS.
Open your printer settings and disable all automatic, print enchantment settings and ICM settings.

When you open the print dialogue settings in Photoshop use Photoshop manages colors.
If your printer supports individual paper settings select your exact paper in the Printer Profile setting.

On my Canon Pixma Pro 9000 I can choose the exact paper i.e. Photo Glossy Paper is not the same as Photo Plus Glossy Paper 2.
Experiment with the Rendering Intent, I start with Relative Colorimetric and check Black point compensation.

If your printer doesn't supply or support ICC paper profiles, match you're PS setting to the printer setting.



On the bottom the the Printer window there's a Gamut warning box.
If you check that you'll get an idea of what's not going to print properly.

 

[ratboyab]

I'm not saying this is the total problem but, the review of this printer from PC Mag. states: "Photo output was unusually poor for an inkjet. I'd peg the quality at slightly below the worst you'd expect from drugstore prints."

Hi Hawkeye, thanks for the reply, as much as I do agree this isn't amazing for photo-prints, this definately isn't the issue I have here as the 2 images in my original post are both print-outs from this machine, the one on the left is printed from windows explorer & the one on the right is direct from photoshop.

Oddly enough though the print-out I've just done is very good, colours, quality, etc... I mean I'm looking at the white shirt and the stripes on it are probably less than 1/2mm between lines yet when I look closely the lines look crisp, no blending or anything which I wasn't expecting. I would actually say the print-out is as good as my old Epson Stylus Photo R-200 (which I know that printer is about 10 years old now but at the time when it was released it was considered one of the top "non-professional" consumer photo printers on the market - I was doing a multi-media course at the time so needed a top-quality photo printer and I got that just after it was released and all the magazines at the time were raving about it, partly because it was one of the 1st consumer printers to be able to print straight on to cd's).




Hi Steve, thanks for your reply. I played around with the settings as much as I could understand them (which isn't much lol) but didn't really seem to make a difference until I went into the print screen and changed the Printer Profile to "Lab Color", I tried a few others to no avail but "Lab Color" seemed to sort the problem.

So thankyou both for your input - Adam

 

[ALB68]

Steve has given you good advice, but maybe I can present it a bit differently.
Do you have your color settings in Photoshop set to RGB or CMYK? You need to be working in the RGB color model first of all. Then check in Edit/Color Settings (down at close to the bottom of the list) to see which profile is assigned to your picture. It needs to be Adobe 1998 for printing. (if it's going to be for web only it needs to be set to the sRGB setting) You can convert it to the proper profile by going to the Convert to Profile dialogue under Edit. (Don't mess with Lab Color unless you know what your doing and intend to use it for a specific purpose.

If you have done any editing to the photo in PS, what you print will reflect the changes you made. If your only going to do this once and a while, and use your printer for printing other than color, you may be able to get by without calibrating your monitor. Otherwise you need to calibrate, so what you see on your screen will match fairly close to your print or what you see online.

Now to the printer:
Next, if your print driver supports it, you should be using a ICC profile for the paper your using. Printer manufacturers and paper manufacturers spend millions of dollars on research to make their products compatible with inks and paper. But, main thing here is to not let the printer manage the color. You need to set the driver so that the printer's ability to do that is turned off and allow Photoshop to manage color.That should be under Color Management. You should also see a drop down to choose Printer Profile and if you obviously don't have a custom profile for a special paper, choose the closest one to what your using.
Do that and see what happens Good luck

 

[Steve]

You need to be working in the RGB color model first of all.

Exactly right I should have mentioned that.
This applies to all versions of Photoshop not just CS5

From Printing from Photoshop CS5

About desktop printing

If your image is in RGB mode, do not convert the document to CMYK mode when printing to a desktop printer. Work entirely in RGB mode. As a rule, desktop printers are configured to accept RGB data and use internal software to convert to CMYK. If you send CMYK data, most desktop printers apply a conversion anyway, with unpredictable results.

 

[ALB68]

Just for info I d/l the manual for this printer. I did not learn much about how the driver works. Described how to set from the menu but saw nothing about printing from PS or other color management. I think I would call their support.


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