Colour problems...

[MarkW19]

I just did a file in photoshop, and printed it out, and the colours it's printed out as are WAY out. They've been ok before...

My printer is a Canon i865, and the colour onscreen was a nice maroon, but it printed out almost as grey.

The colours in my printer seem to be working ok because I've tested them in Quark by doing a few coloured boxes etc.

It's not just photoshop - I exported the file as a TIFF and printed it out from Quark but I got the same problem.

Anyone any ideas?

 

[russed]

im no photoshop expert by a long way but what you have to do when you open a file is to make it so that the colours the file is using is the same as the display on your comp. first of all i think you have to go and calibrate the display under system preferences > display. then when you open the file in photoshop you go into file > and this is where i can not be any more help for the moment as i dont have my external hdd that has photoshop on it! it is something to do with colour. but basically you select the same colour scheme as your calibration! (if am talking rubbish let me know!)


oh by the way, where abouts in leeds are you? i know several people around rothwell/woodlesford and i come from skipton but am in york at the moment at uni.

 

[Gee]

I went to uni in York - which college are you in?

 

[Blue Velvet]

What mode is your image in?

RGB or CMYK or something else like Lab...

 

[russed]

I went to uni in York - which college are you in?

im in alcuin college. well this year (my 2nd) i'm living out. im doing ppe

 

[Gee]

im in alcuin college. well this year (my 2nd) i'm living out. im doing ppe

I was in Vanbrugh, did Biology, way back when!

Apologies to the guy whose thread this is for getting off topic...

 

[MarkW19]

Hehe, I actually live in Harrogate but work in Leeds and spend a lot of my time there

My file is in RGB, and I selected "use embedded colour profile" when opening it up...

 

[Blue Velvet]

Do you know what the profile is?

Try discarding the profile when you open it up. Save it as a temp working file on your desktop. Try printing that version to see if there's any difference...

Try printing another picture that you know has printed perfectly in the past.

Doing these two things will help you narrow it down to the file, profile or printer....

 

[MarkW19]

The funny thing is, when I exported the pic as a tiff, the tiff in Quark looks a slightly differents shade too (like 5% different)...

 

[MarkW19]

Just printed an image that I downloaded straight from Preview, and its fine. The same image also opened up and printed in photoshop is fine (looks exactly the same).

So I guess it must be the way photoshop is handling my colour...

It looks fine onscreen, even when exported into Quark it looks fine.

 

[Blue Velvet]

Just printed an image that I downloaded straight from Preview, and its fine. The same image also opened up and printed in photoshop is fine (looks exactly the same).

So I guess it must be the way photoshop is handling my colour...

It looks fine onscreen, even when exported into Quark it looks fine.

I wouldn't trust a Quark preview as far as I could throw it... if that makes sense.

Try turning colour management off in Photoshop altogether. After that, you may have to exit Pshop & restart it. See if that works...

 

[scan300]

This may or may not solve the problem, but convert your image to CMYK.
Then print it from Quark.

If your colour printer is a 4 colour printer, it's sometimes better to work in the native mode, rather than on the fly conversion. Often printing RGB images to a colour printer from Quark results in grey/desaturated output. Using CMYK images solves that for me.

Profiles are another matter, but they usually don't affect saturation. They affect lightness and colour cast more.