Printing difficulties

Hi, I'm looking for someone to smack my head and point me in a right direction. Here's the short story:
My prints with darker tones come out dull and very dark. Lighter colored photos with a lot of white come out more or less ok.
I'm using Canon Pixma 9000 Pro and printing to HP Glossy photo paper. Reading some posts about color management I've decided to calibrate my monitor and purchased Spyder 3 Pro. Ran through the calibration process, created an ICC profile and defaulted my monitor and the printer to that profile.
I've made sure to disable Windows 7 color management and specified my custom profile everywhere I could find.
I've read some posts related to printing and color management (I can't say I understood everything about color management, but I'm still learning), still couldn't figure out why my prints come out like that.
I've been printing from LR3 and directly from Windows with similar results.

Do you guys have any ideas I could try to fix this?

Aleness wrote in post #13679453
... Ran through the calibration process, created an ICC profile and defaulted my monitor and the printer to that profile...

[EMphasis added]

This might be the problem. I believe the printer should use the profile specific to the paper you are using, not the monitor profile.

So, I need to get a Canon printer profile specific to HP Glossy photo paper, right?

Aleness wrote in post #13680002
So, I need to get a Canon printer profile specific to HP Glossy photo paper, right?

Try using the Canon Glossy paper profile, it should be close.

Don't do this with HP paper or other paper you don't have a specific "profile" for. Start out with Canon paper that you have a "named" profile for. Using "off-brand" papers can be ugly unless they come from a company such as Red River or such that provides profiles for their paper to use with your printer.

Then, run some test prints, but don't have both Lightroom and the printer managing color -- you can do either but not both. To check things out, go into your printer driver and turn off color management and then in Lightroom in the Print module in the Print Job panel there is the Color Management option -- open that and go to the Other option to choose the right profile for your paper/printer -- the Canon driver should have installed those when you installed the driver.

Do a couple prints. One thing to check is the brightness -- calibrating often does not do a great job on adjusting your monitor brightness. To compare, you have to look at your print in good light -- either daylight or a lamp that has both decent wattage and also a "neutral" color if you want to compare colors. If under good light the print is still dark, then you can lower the brightness of your monitor to match the prints and then do some more testing and tweaking.

If you have the printer manage the color, you can still tweak the monitor to match both the brightness and the colors if you wish. That can be a decent "starting place", although learning to work with color-management in your system will give you more "control".

And be aware that the upcoming release of Lightroom 4 has "soft proofing", with a preview image and some features that will help you to prepare for a print...

Have a read here: https://photography-on-the.net …/showthread.php​?t=1132002

I have run into the same issues, and I am using canon PRo platinum paper. I have set the print profiel through DPP to the canon pro platinum and then in properties I turned off the color correction by setting it to none and also set the rendering intent to perceptual. This has given me more consistant results and has printed actual blue sky instead of a purple hue sky with relative colormetric as the canon tech told me to set it on. I still get some odd results with some of my photos like sunsets where the colors will be more saturated and the print will be much darker than whats on my monitor. I even turned down the brightness on my monitor to 50% and it is still darker. Other pics print fine so I believe this is a result of the workflow I used in those pics. I tried converting the profiles to match the other photos but it still is not really right. Anyway it takes some trial and error for sure.

Try printing through DPP and see what you get. I have had no luck printing through CS5 and I dont have LR. Make sure you follow the guide Tony posted though and get rid of that HP paper and get canon paper and atleast the Pro platinum paper to try out. If you use a different paper profile or no paper profile it will alter the look. It is odd that I get much the same result with no profile selected as with the correct profile.

As far as monitor calibration goes i know nothing about it, and so far most of the pics I print are really really close to what my crappy TN panel monitor is showing me.

Thank you guys, I'm gonna try your suggestions tonight when I get home.

First, calibrate your monitor. Without that, all the rest is like wandering around with a blindfold on.

That printer is widely enough used that many paper manufacturers provide ICC profiles for it. For example, I have used a bunch of Moab papers with mine, and all worked fine.

So, here is what I suggest:

--calibrate your monitor. Don't waste ink until you have done this.
--use only a paper for which you have the correct profile. That ICC profile is ONLY used for the printer. It would be fine to start with Canon papers, as your printer came with ICC profiles for them.
--turn off all driver matching in the printer properties dialog. You've turned off windows color matching. Set that drop down to "none" if you haven't.
--also in printer properties: make sure that you have selected the proper medium. (This is easier with Canon papers: they are named in the dialog box). this is separate from the ICC. it tells the printer what the surface is and how to lay down ink.
--while you are in printer properties, make sure that quality is set to high.
--In the software you are using, select the ICC for the paper. This is essential. When you turned off windows color matching, you were telling the printer that the software, not the printer, should manage color. it needs a color profile with which to do this.
--If your software has an option for this (Lightroom does it automatically), turn on black point compensation. Select "perceptual" rendering. (this is not always the best, but it is a good starting point.)

I'm not in front of mine, but I think that is all I do. I'm not a printing expert, but so far, the large majority of my prints have come out fine this way. A few have not and need further tweaking.

Keep in mind that prints will look different from images on the screen regardless of what you do. First, they rely on reflected light, which creates a less bright, snappy appearance than backlit computer monitors. Second, you will generally need more sharpening for an inkjet print than for an image on screen. Without that, the image will look a bit dull. Lightroom is handy for this--you just tell it before printing whether to add no, standard, or high levels of output sharpening. but if you are printing from something else, just make the image a bit oversharpened on screen before you print.

Paddler4 has done an excellent job of covering the main points. All I would add is you must be patient, wait until the prints have had 24 hours to dry before viewing them in good natural daylight (I use our dining room table).

And if you're still having problems, maybe starting with a known standard image to print will help. There's a link at the bottom of this page to DOWNLOAD ALL the high-resolution 300 ppi tutorial files to print.