Imac and Pixma pro 100 color issues

I just bought the printer 2 days ago and the iMac a couple weeks ago. At first everything looked darker than the LR and PS images (both CC but using the LR classic version) I do have the plug in installed and I spent an hour having a Canon tech access my PC to make sure it was using the default settings. Even lightening them my blues look purplish and yellow looks mustard color not the vivid color on the screen. when I tried to adjust the cyan magenta and yellow it didn't seem to help without throwing everything else off. I am not a pro at photography photoshop or obv printers.. any suggestions??
Also the tech stated Macs weren't great for work involving printers because the monitor is too bright/vivid/ contrasty. so does that mean if Im shooting in raw and making everything look how I want it I will still never get a matching print? Even if I send it to a lab? Im confused and thinking maybe this was a waste of money.

At the very least you'll need a calibrator that does your monitor; if not a calibrator that does both monitor and printer (the latter are very expensive).

hkerns wrote in post #19083429
Im confused and thinking maybe this was a waste of money.

It c a n be expensive.

PM sent.

hkerns wrote in post #19083429
I just bought the printer 2 days ago and the iMac a couple weeks ago. At first everything looked darker than the LR and PS images (both CC but using the LR classic version) I do have the plug in installed and I spent an hour having a Canon tech access my PC to make sure it was using the default settings. Even lightening them my blues look purplish and yellow looks mustard color not the vivid color on the screen. when I tried to adjust the cyan magenta and yellow it didn't seem to help without throwing everything else off. I am not a pro at photography photoshop or obv printers.. any suggestions??
Also the tech stated Macs weren't great for work involving printers because the monitor is too bright/vivid/ contrasty. so does that mean if Im shooting in raw and making everything look how I want it I will still never get a matching print? Even if I send it to a lab? Im confused and thinking maybe this was a waste of money.

Have been printing with an old 2009 iMac and Spyder4 PRO and currently on a 2017 27” 2TB iMac along with a Spyder5 PRO on Canon PRO-10.
For my 2017 you have 16 Squares of levels of brightness. I keep it a Square 8.
Calibrate with Spyder and spot on.
SpyderX is the most current today. Also other brands as well.
Also must match the Printer Paper type profile as well.
I printed with Aperture years ago. I now print through Lightroom Classic.

hkerns wrote in post #19083429
Also the tech stated Macs weren't great for work involving printers because the monitor is too bright/vivid/ contrasty.

Seems like an an odd statement given how many macs are used in the media/design industry.

You need to calibrate your system. You are trying to match images on a screen that emits light to those on a medium that reflect light. You need to calibrate your monitor so that your computer knows how it displays colour and can adjust accordingly. Then you need print profiles that take into account the paper/printer/ink you are using so that your system can alter the data it sends to the printer so that it is as close as possible to what you saw on the monitor.

I was going to start doing children's portraits for people for free. I wanted to be able to at least give them a couple of prints. I thought I'd possibly be saving a couple dollars. I really don't have any extra income to blow right now. between the printer, iMac, used camera/lenses.. I'm about 4k in. So maybe I should just return printer? I only have until Tuesday. I reduced brightness of my monitor. switched to srgb. I printed a few landscapes.. farm pics.. and photos of my son and they look horrible. the colors aren't looking as off as they were but they are very dull and flat looking. The monitor looks close to what we actually saw. I tried increasing the vibrance and saturation.. LR Classic. but it made very little difference. frustrated!

Like others said above... you need to calibrate your computer properly. After that you need to make sure you are using the printer profiles for the exact paper you are using. Until you do these two things you will probably to continue to get sub-par prints... but IF you spend a little time to figure it out you will be rewarded with some absolutely beautiful results.

Thats what I thought about the iMac. but the Canon printer tech had a different opinion. Even with the brightness at half power its still not even close. The printer colors are very drab. Maybe Mpix or one of the cheaper consumer printing places will be closer to what my expectations are. Green green and vibrant reds? Idk. Ive spent way way too much money at this point. Even if I could get a calibrator I probably wouldn't know quite what to do with it.

What paper are you using? Are you using the correct profile plugin?

https://www.usa.canon.​com …s/groups/3rd-party-papers

But even when I turn green up in LRC and print it out.. it makes little difference. that doesn't seem right. Im choosing the proper paper.. Canon plus glossy ll. Do you own this printer and do you achieve excellent results with it?

I have a PRO-10. Same thing, essentially. ALso have an iMac.

I'm not really sure what you are doing wrong. Has to be calibration or profile/paper issue.

Dan Marchant wrote in post #19084299
Seems like an an odd statement given how many macs are used in the media/design industry.

It's a well known issue with iMac's as they have a very glossy screen and native colour settings that are high on contrast, saturation and brightness.
Calibration helps a lot, but most people in the design industry I know just adapt and adjust. If you use the same computer for 8+ hours a day your brain can do some amazing things to correct for inaccurate colours and brightness.
Note that a lot of the high end rips used by the print industry only run on Windows.

iMac's do take calibration well, but they will always have a high gloss look to them as it's the nature of the screen.

hkerns wrote in post #19088827
But even when I turn green up in LRC and print it out.. it makes little difference. that doesn't seem right. Im choosing the proper paper.. Canon plus glossy ll. Do you own this printer and do you achieve excellent results with it?

It sounds like you've jumped in the deep end. I tried it once and went down a very deep rabbit hole of colour profiles that got very technical very quickly. I did end up being able to produce perfectly colour matched images, but it took some time and trial and error, and the in end I just went back to getting a professional printer to handle all my printing for me.

Printing is a discipline with a level of expertise all to itself, some people are very good at it and understand it and some don't.


The colour shifts your describing sound like a conversion from one colour space to another (likely aRGB to sRGB), is happening somewhere in the print process and not being handled properly. This maybe a setting in LR, it maybe a setting in the printer driver, or it maybe a setting in the printer software, or it be any combination of all 3.

There are plenty of resources out there to solve the issue, and even plenty of knowledgeable people here, but it sounds like you need to ask yourself if it's a rabbit hole you want to dive down.
The first step in the process would be calibrating your monitor.

I had to cut my iMac brightness back a good bit during calibration. Once doing that, my prints from LR are dead on coming off my Pro-1000. PS is a different story which I haven't figured out yet, so I always save and export/import back into LR.

How are you printing? From Lightroom? From Photoshop?

First, you need to calibrate your monitor. Full stop. If you don't have the colors set right and the brightness set right, you are not going to match what you see on screen. This is one reason why novice printers so often say that their prints are too dark. It's because they are editing on a monitor that is too bright.

Second, I don't know whether this is part of your problem, but a common cause of distorted colors is having both the software and the print driver trying to control color. It has to be one or the other. If you are printing from LR or PS, have them set to control color (in lightroom, you use the drop down menu to substitute the profile for you paper for the default "printer control"). Then you have to tell the printer software not to control color. This may be different on a Mac, but on a PC, this is done by going to the printer properties and setting color matching to "none." Maybe someone who uses a Mac can say whether it's different on a Mac. When I first started printing, I had a lot of color casts, and that was the problem.

Re "proper paper"--there is no proper paper. Any paper for which you can get an ICC profile for that printer is fine. I used a pro-100 for several years and used papers from Moab, Canson, Red River, and Canon. All worked just fine.

I don't understand your reference to a plug-in. There are various plug-ins you can use, but none are necessary. I have never used any of them with any of my Canon printers. I print almost entirely from Lightoom (even when I have edited in Photoshop), and it works just fine without any plugins.

The Pro-100 is a superb printer. It doesn't produce archival prints because it uses dye-based inks, but if you put carefully done prints from that printer and my expensive Prograf next to each other, it's very hard to see the difference. So it's worth your time to get this right.

Good luck. Hope this helps.