Printing with Pixma9000 II - something's still not quite right (Quality & Media)

Sorry for yet another question on this tired subject.

Finally got the nerve to try printing with the Pixma 9000 II that's been sitting in its box for five months. I thought I had color management down, but something's still not quite right; my first few prints have a bit too much saturation in red/magenta. "Messing around" with different settings seems to be hit and miss, and printing other images doesn't seem to help.

- Using this printer evaluation image.
- Printing directly from Lightroom
- Laptop screen calibrated with a Colormunki Display
- Using Red River paper from a sample pack
- Downloaded ICC profiles from Red River
- Color management is handled by Lightroom, using the profile specific for the paper type.

The only things I'm not sure about are:
- The "Quality and Media" pull-down in the Print settings. For my first two prints on Arctic Polar Gloss and Polar Pearl Metallic, I left it on "Glossy Photo Paper" and "High quality." There are a lot of options, and the available selections vary based on the selected ICC profile.

- The color space of the original photo. Shouldn't matter, right? It should all be automatic if I've selected the right ICC profile and turned off printer color management - when Lightroom renders the image to print, it doesn't matter if the original was sRGB or AdobeRGB or whatever. They look fine on the screen when I soft-proof using the relevant ICC profile.

What else might I be missing? The skin tones look correct and healthy on the screen, but even the "yellow" skin tones are very pink/magenta on the print. The rocks/sky are very saturated, the sunset is a bit dark/saturated, but those strawberries look red and juicy and delicious.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/nathancarter/8​041044552/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/nathancarter/8​041036749/

The best thing to do I to get custom icc profiles made rather than using the generic ones. This will ensure what you see on the calibrated screen comes out your printer. It is worth the money as you will save from not wasting ink and paper.

Red River provides individual profiles specifically for the combination of this printer and each of their paper types. I wouldn't consider these to be "generic" profiles like the ones that come with the OS or with the printer driver.

What else would a custom profile do, that these profiles do not?
http://www.redrivercat​alog.com …-mkii-color-profiles.html

At this point I'm not (yet) even concerned with perfectly matching the screen. You can tell the print is not right, even without comparing it to what's on the screen. I'm hoping it's just a check-box somewhere that I've overlooked, though I've gone through all the menus a couple of times and everything looks right.

nathancarter wrote in post #15064676
Red River provides individual profiles specifically for the combination of this printer and each of their paper types. I wouldn't consider these to be "generic" profiles like the ones that come with the OS or with the printer driver.

What else would a custom profile do, that these profiles do not?
http://www.redrivercat​alog.com …-mkii-color-profiles.html

...

The profiles RR provides have been made for whatever individual copy of the printer that they have access to. The Pro Canon's don't vary much, but they do vary. A custom profile will be better at the margins, but if the differences you're seeing are gross, the profile may not be the issue.

Did RR tell you what Canon media type to use with the paper? If you don't choose the same media-type they used to create the profile then you'll likely be a long way off. The media-type setting changes the amounts of ink, that are laid down but also the proportions if there are differences in the colour of the paper substrate to compensate for.

BTW, choose 300 dpi for your print resolution, rather than 240. That way LR will re-sample to 300 rather than the printer driver, which does a less good job. This won't affect the colours but may well affect IQ - sharpness etc.

Cheers

Tim

Nathan,

I have used quite a number of Red River profiles with that printer and have had very good results, so there is probably something set wrong. I also would not worry (at least yet) about variations among individual printers.

RR provides information for the appropriate medium for each of their papers, I believe. It of course varies from one of their papers to another. Yes, you want "high quality." Color space should not be relevant, if you are shooting raw and printing directly from Lightroom (which is what I usually do).

There are lots of settings, so it is hard to know what might be going wrong, but I will give you two hunches. First, telling the software to manage colors does NOT turn off color management in the printer's firmware, and you definitely do not want both working. You turn off the printer's color management from the printer's properties dialog box. From the print dialog, call up properties. Select the "main" tab. Look for "color/intensity" directly under print quality. check "manual" and then "set". Choose the "matching" tab, and select "none." This will turn off color management in the printer's firmware. This is my first guess, since having both on can cause too much of a reddish tint. (I have not tried this with my 9000, but that was the effect with an older Canon printer.)

Second, even if you have a calibrated monitor, the print is unlikely to match without tweaking because the gamut of papers tends to be more limited. This is particularly true of matte papers. The errors, in my experience, are usually not too much reds--in fact, some reds on screen are out of gamut on some of the papers I use. Still, it is worth checking. LR 4 has excellent soft proofing, so I would try that.

I agree that 300 is the ideal DPI, but that should not affect your problem, and I have numerous times accidentally printed at the default 240 and found it hard to tell the difference.

I hope this helps.

Dan

paddler4 wrote in post #15067132
RR provides information for the appropriate medium for each of their papers, I believe. It of course varies from one of their papers to another. Yes, you want "high quality." Color space should not be relevant, if you are shooting raw and printing directly from Lightroom (which is what I usually do).

I think Dan got it. I had a hunch that the media type was what I was missing, but I didn't see anywhere that indicated that I should change it, so I left it on the defaults. But, in the zip files containing the ICC profile files, there's a text file with a little bit of additional information, including the media type that goes with each paper type. For example, for Arctic Polar Gloss you need "Photo Paper Plus Glossy II" and not the default of "Glossy Photo Paper." Well, of course, how silly of me.

It's interesting that in the development of color management, the ICC profile and the media type were left to remain so ... separate. At a minimum, I would think that the ICC profile would include the correct media type by default, with the option to choose something else if you have a good reason.

I'll need to inspect tonight's test prints in better light tomorrow. It looks good so far.

Thank you.

paddler4 wrote in post #15067132
telling the software to manage colors does NOT turn off color management in the printer's firmware

In OSX (newer versions) it does…

If you use LR4, you can "soft-proof" the image to see if any of the colors are out of gamut. For me, I did have to manually adjust the settings in the printer driver (and make sure your turn off the color management in the printer driver itself; set it to "None").

My experience, with a Pro9000 MKII, Red River paper, etc. is very, very similar. It was driving me crazy. I calibrated my laptop monitor (I use ColorHug, but I'm a Linux guy) and used paper profiles--but the colors were off (especially red).

Finally, I got a monitor that would support color calibration (Dell U2312HM) and wouldn't drain my finances. It's not an EIZO, but it does what I need to accurately display an sRGB gamut. Unless you have a new MacBook Pro, I think that's your problem.

Night and day. I use a twin display, and after calibrating both, can clearly see the shift when I move an image from the monitor to the laptop.

Everything prints e-x-a-c-t-l-y as I see it on the Dell. Now I'm having fun draining ink out of the printer with gorgeous 13x19 prints.

I am having the same problem and have tried just about everything. From what I've seen, the most accurate colors are when using the Canon easy photo print pro software or in printer settings. However, the color is still off when using these.

rioni -

In addition to choosing the right ICC profile, you have to choose the right media type under "Quality and Media". For Red River papers, it varies by paper type, and just leaving it on the default of "Glossy Photo Paper" isn't adequate. Red River tells you the media type inside a text file that's in the zip file for the ICC profile.

I think this has solved my problem, but I haven't had the chance to print and evaluate more than just a couple test images to be certain.