Oh dear, another "prints are too dark" thread

I wonder if anyone's got any bright ideas on this?

I've printed a couple of things out at home recently on my HP C6180 printer and have been disappointed by how dark they look.

A bit of background info; printing from Elements 8 on my MacBook running the latest version of SL using either the HP profile or a custom printer profile with HP inks and paper. Drivers are up to date. Monitor is an external Dell SIPS panel, colour calibrated with a Huey Pro which won't allow for luminance calibration, but my brightness is down to 20 and contrast set to 60 on the display.

Now here's the rub. Prints from a external print shop [Such as prints via iPhoto] look correct for brightness compared to my monitor, whilst prints made on my printer look v dark.

I've tried soft proofing [via Elements+ add-on] and the soft proofs look fine, just like the original nearly.

I'm suspecting my printer has gone off the boil, but before I consider a wholesale change, has anyone got any suggestions of anything else I may be overlooking?

Cheers.

Print preview in the printer driver is off?

Might be a printer driver / SL problem.


Some things google found. May or may not be related / work:
http://blog.fosketts.n​et …eopard-hp-printer-driver/

Did you set the Elements to use printer's profile or Elements' profile?

Thanks guys.

dchen99, I'll have another look, I can't remember now if I tried it both ways or not [re printer vs Elements managing colour]. René, thanks for that article, Software Update has updated the drivers since I upgraded to SL, but I'll double check them against that article. Also what do you mean by print preview in the printer driver is off?

If the printer driver offers a preview option, it should be off. For some reason it appears to cause problems. Link (no idea why: my printer driver doesn't offer a preview)

Thanks René, that's an available box to click but I haven't done that. I'll also have a try printing from our Windows machine tonight to see if that gives a similar result as I haven't tried that yet.

Can you use a paper and associated icc profile for your printer? It may help a lot.