Too much red in prints - any ideas?

I'd much appreciate some printing color help. I confess I am not very knowledgeable with this, but I'm not totally helpless either (I hope!).

My pictures have too much red. This is particularly true when the background tends toward reddish, but even pictures with little red have whatever red there is slightly exaggerated. I have a Canon i960 printer. I had not noticed this problem until recently, but I'm wondering if I've just gotten picky!

Example: Last week I took some shots at an indoor rock wall where the walls were a reddish-sandy kind of color; in the prints the entire picture is much too red - the walls are much redder and the subjects' fleshtones are red.

Here is what I have done:
- I looked at the pictures on three different monitors, one of which is a CRT and they look the same everywhere except the print.
- I've tried printing from Photoshop Elements 2.0 and from the Canon Easy-Print software.
- I ran the printhead cleaning and then ran the printhead test and everything looks perfect.

No dice. My next move is to send some out to be printed to see the difference. Any ideas very much welcome.

If they all look the same on 3 different monitors, it would appear that the problem is with the printer -- not necessarily meaning it doesn't work right, but may in fact print using a different "profile" than your software programs are delivering. While I can't begin to tell you what profile you should be using, converting to that profile for printing should result in a print that looks just as it does on your 3 monitors. Out of curiosity, when you view the pictures on 3 different monitors, are you using the same computer or different ones? It seems unlikely that 3 different monitors would be calibrated to the same degree of error.

Others on this forum surely will be able to give you more specifics.

If you send it to a good lab, they might "automatically" convert to their printer profile and deliver you a print that looks like you think it should also.

Jim

I once had similar problems with the same printer.

Check this post for suggestions: https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=29530

Thanks for the help. The three monitors were with two different computers.

Regarding the profiles, since I'm using an i960 and have printed with the Canon software, I (should) be using the correct profile. Woody, thank you for helping me understand the process much better, but I don't think I'm ready to invest in mixing and matching the profiles.

BTW, I spent about an hour on the phone with Canon. They didn't solve the problem but did try to help and eliminated me wondering if I did something wrong. Before going further I'm going to have them printed by a lab and see where it goes. Maybe I'm just too picky, but then aren't most of us with this stuff? Thanks again!

well im going to tell you my story i shot a indoor race and most were reddish then i tried something i changed the white setting to thee different light bulbs being used in the hall and guess what if you have the setting on the wrong type lights it turns your pics either red or blue and auto white doesnt really help

There may be a quick fix to this kind of problem, I do not know.

In my case to get the printed pictures to have the same (or close) colours as the screen involved profiling the printer (in my case an i950) for the paper and ink combination that I was using. A different profile is needed for each paper and ink combination used.

The software I used for this is ProfilePrism.

I went the whole way and purchased a Spyder2 to profile my monitor. Now I always get the colours right.

A good book on this is Color Cofidence by Tim Grey

I've checked the profile and I think it is correct. If the color from the photo lab is the same as my printer, I think I will try the Spyder2 or something like it. Thanks.

A "quick & dirty" fix would be to add an Adjustment Layer to remove the red cast. Then just drag it into every new pic before you print it.

I use the ilford profiles on my pixma 5000 to solve the too much red issue.