Strange Printing Results From Canon Desktop Printer

Can anyone explain this odd printing behavior? The first image is the file I'm trying to print. The second image is an attempt to simulate the print I'm getting. I've tried to recreate the effect in PS since I don't have a working scanner at the moment.
There's mainly one small area that's got me scratching my head. Look at the finish on the center of the body of the guitar. The original image shows this nice, warm, orange-brown woodgrain finish. In the print his area is almost a completely desaturated yellow-gray color

Way too many variables to suss this out, but here's a quick list of some of the possible culprits.

3rd party ink, 3rd party paper, changes to color profile, incorrect profiles for either of the the above, incorrect settings anywhere in the process, monitor could be off, hack, the monitor could be showing it wrong and the printer could be accurate! We can't tell from here.

Until you are in a completely color managed environment, little color variations like this will never be uncommon. My guess is that if WE COULD see your monitor and your prints, we'd be able to find a lot more than one area of color variation.

All that said, even without being able to actually see any of what you are seeing, it "sounds" like it may be a simple problem of the SRGB Vs ARGB settings.

That is strange especially since the color on his striped jacket and his skin tones have not changed. Weird.

FarmerTed1971 wrote in post #18148648
That is strange especially since the color on his striped jacket and his skin tones have not changed. Weird.

Not really because this is not a scanned copy of the print, but a simulation done in PS, where I guess the OP simply desaturated and maybe adjusted HSL on the mostly affected area.

One thing that I would never do is convert from a smaller colourspace such as sRGB to a larger one, such as aRGB in this case, without also increasing the bit depth of the image. Unless you are planning on making really big changes to HSL you will only lose colours by that conversion, since your existing image will have no extra colours for the new larger space to use, but you have to lose some colour resolution to allow for those nonexistent colours. Even if your printer could support more than sRGB there is no point in making a change to a larger space, and then back to the printer space.

I'm also going to go with the fact that third party inks with third party papers are going to require a custom profile, and could have several specific colours that end up being very wrong, while similar colours seem OK. It seems to me as if you are not actually using a calibrated system in the first place. You need to have a calibrated monitor, as well as the correct profile for the printer/ink/paper combination. The profiles provided by Ilford always assume that you are using OEM ink sets in the printers they provide profiles for.

Alan

When printing from within PS, are you letting photoshop manage colors or the printer manage colors (in the print dialog)? If you are letting photoshop manage colors, what printer profile and rendering intent are you using? If you are using an ICC profile, set it up for soft-proofing in PS with the same rendering intent and see if the photoshop soft-proof rendering demonstrates the same issue in the preview. Also, enable the gamut warning in PS and see if this area is, for some reason, out of gamut.

If you are letting the printer manage the colors, then I have no ideas for you - sorry!

kirk

FarmerTed1971 wrote in post #18148648
That is strange especially since the color on his striped jacket and his skin tones have not changed. Weird.

Simulated image, we are not seeing the real thing.

AH, got it.

OK. Now we're getting somewhere. There's all kind of settings I can experiment with but I wanted to try taking a more scientific approach and not waste too much paper and ink and time. All I've tried so far is making a new 8x10 crop and leaving it as an sRGB file. The print looks identical to the Adobe RGB print I made earlier. So I've got that out of the way.

As already noted, my monitor has not been hardware calibrated. But I try to keep after it with an occasional Adobe Gamma adjustment. It looks a bunch better than most other "out of the box" monitors, though I know it's not perfect. I also know my prints won't be an exact match. But in most regards the prints come out surprisingly close to the monitor's display and that's good enough for me.

Next I'll probably try working with color management settings, if I can remember how to access all the different adjustments. I'll probably be doing a bit of "refresher" reading on working with these settings in PS.

http://www.computer-darkroom.com/ps7_colou​r/ps7_2.htm

In the Canon print settings dialog I've disabled the "use ICM Windows Color Management" setting. I have made some tweaks to the color settings to create a sort of printer profile for the 3rd party inks and Ilford papers. I think Ilford has since gone out of the inkjet photo paper business.

The only other thing I thought I might try would be to print some test strips of the affected area with just the red desaturated, then with just the green and just the blue desaturated. May have a little time to mess around with it this weekend.

Thanks for all the suggestions and I'll keep you posted on the results.

And it looks like I need to re-read this a couple of three times again.

http://www.computer-darkroom.com/ps7_print​/ps7_print_1.htm

I went thru this same info a few years ago but it seems like some "knowledge gaps" have developed since then. This ought to help fill them in...