HP Paper on Canon Printer

I recently purchased a shiny new Canon Pixma Pro-100 printer and I have a decent amount of glossy HP photo paper I obtained for a good price (free) which I'd like to use up. I've done a few prints with it and so far everything looks dark. What's the best way to adjust the print settings for this (for now I'll be printing from Photoshop).

1st question, are you using a calibrated monitor? It may be that the pictures look 'good' on your screen but if it's not calibrated your printer is printing out how they 'really' look.

It may not be related to your choice in paper at all.

That being said, printer manufacturers make their paper and ink work best together. You will not get optimal results with HP paper and Canon ink.

I don't have expertise in matching printers with "off-brand" papers, you could benefit from some of that...

A couple things that you can try, though:

First off, consumer monitors are typically way too bright out of the box. When I get a new monitor (or laptop) I first off turn the Brightness way down, until the display almost turns ugly. Try that, in fact see if you can turn it down far enough to match your prints!

From there, monitor calibration can help, although I've found it's typically more effective with colors than with monitor brightness/print darkness, which is why I recommend cranking that brightness down right off the bat!

Then, I'd advise you to experiment with the Soft Proof tool in Photoshop, since you say you're using PS. What I don't know is what comes with the driver/software for your Canon printer. If the software provides "profiles" for Canon paper, printer and inks, then the first thing is to pick a profile for the Canon glossy paper -- hopefully it will do a decent job of matching the results of the HP glossy paper, although like I said, I have no expertise there.

In the Soft Proof tool, try that profile, and see how it lines up with your prints! There may be some "tricks" to using the Soft Proof tool, maybe others can chime in there.

While in the Soft Proof tool you can do "tweaks" in the image editor, and then do test prints tweak and test, and see if you can get good results in the Soft Proofing. If you do, you can save them by creating an Action, because for one thing you will likely want to save an image for Web use or "sharing" before tweaking it for printing, so keep an eye on what you are doing so you can record it!

One last thing: when viewing prints to compare them to an image on your monitor, you should realize you are dealing with two ways of illuminating the image. The monitor "back-lights" an image, whereas with a print you are seeing a reflection from available light. So it's typical to view a print using generic indoor lighting, which is not good for comparing with the image from a monitor! Because of that it's best to view prints in "good" neutral light, light that is similar to viewing them in daylight (not direct sun, though). In fact, people who are serious/professional about printing have lights that are by design good for brightness and neutral for color for the purpose of viewing prints. And, a lot of those folks also have their monitors "hooded" to prevent the ambient light from interfering with their processing work!

tonylong wrote in post #17006501
First off, consumer monitors are typically way too bright out of the box. When I get a new monitor (or laptop) I first off turn the Brightness way down, until the display almost turns ugly. Try that, in fact see if you can turn it down far enough to match your prints!

From there, monitor calibration can help, although I've found it's typically more effective with colors than with monitor brightness/print darkness, which is why I recommend cranking that brightness down right off the bat!

Then, I'd advise you to experiment with the Soft Proof tool in Photoshop, since you say you're using PS. What I don't know is what comes with the driver/software for your Canon printer. If the software provides "profiles" for Canon paper, printer and inks, then the first thing is to pick a profile for the Canon glossy paper -- hopefully it will do a decent job of matching the results of the HP glossy paper, although like I said, I have no expertise there...

I would agree with Tony about monitor brightness. If you have a calibrator then 80 cd/m^2 is about right for photo editing. This will make it easier to compare a print to the screen. Otherwise, go for a brightness that can be reasonably compared to a print. Contrast is also very important. There are a number of online tools for helping with that.

You can try Tony's suggestion on substituting profiles, but in order to have a baseline, you ought to use some Canon paper intended for the same profile. That way, you will be able to determine how well the HP paper stacks up to a known quantity. The biggest problem is probably the lack of a calibrated monitor -- even a simply DIY calibration is better than nothing. Otherwise, getting a reasonable comparison between the screen and print may be an exercise in frustration.

Printer manufacturers usually have their own photo paper, but you will never find profiles for using their paper on competitors printers. And, their ink formulations are different as well as differences in their papers can cause colors to be out-of-whack. HP paper in a Canon printer usually isn't too hard to fix with a little color tweaking in the printer settings.

I have a lot of HP paper that various people give me when they want some prints. I never use it -- I prefer using either Ilford or Canon photo paper although the HP paper isn't too bad for run of the mill stuff like school bulletin boards and posters and other things that won't be framed and hung on the wall.

I haven't tried soft proofing without a profile specifically made for the paper being used in the printer, so I'll yield to Tony's advice on that.

You might try the ICC profiles found here:

http://www.precisionco​lors.com/PC42ICC.html

They are made for PrecisionColors inks, but these match the original inks quite closely (so I read).

Thanks for the replies and good information. As a matter of fact I just recently purchased a calibrator (Spyder4-Pro) so yes, my monitor is calibrated. Previously I had gone through an online DIY calibration procedure, so I probably wasn't too far off.

It's interesting that you mention 80 cd/m^2 is a good brightness level for photo editing - the Spyder4 software had me set the brightness to 180 (which seems much too bright). With that being said, I had the monitor at a much lower brightness than that when I edited this particular photo, though I have no way of knowing exactly what the level was. I'll rerun the calibration tonight to set the monitor to 80 and go from there (I have a hunch that's going to be pretty close to where I was at before).

As far as the paper profiles that are in the print driver, they have a generic glossy photo paper selection I was using. Other than that it sounds like I may just have to experiment a bit with the brightness and contrast settings for the printer to get as close as possible.

Your brightness of 180 is WAAAY too bright! 80 cd/m2 is about right.

But what this means is until you reprocess your images with the monitor at this new level, whatever you do about importing HP paper profiles is wasted effort.

Lowner wrote in post #17006921
Your brightness of 180 is WAAAY too bright! 80 cd/m2 is about right.

But what this means is until you reprocess your images with the monitor at this new level, whatever you do about importing HP paper profiles is wasted effort.

The monitor wasn't anywhere near that bright when I processed photos, I only just received the SPYDER4 yesterday and set it to 180 as instructed. I'd done a DIY calibration online and was using the setting from that to process photos (and as I mentioned the monitor was much darker than 180).

Now then, this brings up a question.... why in the world would the Spyder4 software have me set the monitor brightness to 180?

My guess is that a bright monitor looks pretty while a dim one doesn't. They are more interested in what people think about their calibrator than how well it works for photo editing. Also some lower cost monitors control brightness by pulsing the backlighting. At low intensity settings, the flickering can result in eye strain as well as some color issues.

Just to round out the discussion, the differences in the paper, as just paper, is that it's either for dye ink or pigment. I don't know about HP, but it was embarrassing to learn this with Epson paper in a Pro9000MKII. Trying to print dye ink on pigment paper looks pretty bad, as dye is designed to soak in and not float on top. I've schooled up since, and have swapped out for a Pro-100. I prefer the dye inkjet for its wider gamut and darker blacks. The only catch, is to coat the final print with UV protection--then it'll last as long as the pigment prints.

So, is a "Pro-100" a "dye ink" printer, and is the OP using "HP photo paper" using paper for pigment ink?

Kumsa wrote in post #17017614
Just to round out the discussion, the differences in the paper, as just paper, is that it's either for dye ink or pigment. I don't know about HP, but it was embarrassing to learn this with Epson paper in a Pro9000MKII. Trying to print dye ink on pigment paper looks pretty bad, as dye is designed to soak in and not float on top. I've schooled up since, and have swapped out for a Pro-100. I prefer the dye inkjet for its wider gamut and darker blacks. The only catch, is to coat the final print with UV protection--then it'll last as long as the pigment prints.

I think that I would use paper that had profiles for the intended printer. There are a few papers that are strictly for pigment inks, but most will work with either dye or pigment inks. I don't know about Epson paper or the cheap brand X stuff, but the high quality photo paper doesn't work as you described it -- it isn't as simple as the dye soaking in and the pigment sitting on the surface. High quality papers have a porous polymer coating that swells to encapsulate the ink droplets whether dye or pigment. It would be undesirable to have an ink that just sat on the surface because of bronzing.

The pigment inks used by Canon use nanotechnology pigments which basically means that the particle size is nearly approaching the same order of magnitude as the dye molecule size. The primary difference is that the pigments are more color stable than dye over a long period of time.

I have been using Ilford paper for a very long time and most of their papers can be used with either dye or pigment inkjet printers. They have a few papers that are intended for pigment inkjet printers "for best results", but I have found them to be perfectly acceptable for use with a dye based inkjet printer. The one caveat would be the need for creating your own profile.

I still have and use a Canon i9900 dye inkjet printer and it makes incredibly great prints. I also have a Canon PIXMA Pro 9500 Mark II pigment inkjet printer. I can't really tell if the new printer that uses pigment inks is any better, but it does have two blacks and a gray so there is more ink to buy. I haven't made a comparison of gamuts, but from comparing prints, I don't see any significant difference.

tonylong wrote in post #17017765
So, is a "Pro-100" a "dye ink" printer, and is the OP using "HP photo paper" using paper for pigment ink?

Yes, the Pro-100 is a dye ink and the 4 HP photo papers that I know are all dye ink compatible (the great old swellable polymer Premium Plus Photo Paper is even dye-only).

The problem is in getting the right profiles for using HP papers on the Pro-100 (and having the option to apply them, of course).