I'm lost.

I have been trying to print some photos lately, but my printer likes to print my photos with such weird colors in comparison to my monitor.

Most of the time the photo is just darker after the print, but it's never a consistent change.

Could anyone help me with getting my printer and monitor calibrated to each other?

you have to make sure you have the right profile for the printer. when I used to print photos at school in austin in lightroom we would have to adjust the settings for printing based on the printer profile we were using/ we would make sure the printer wouldn't do any color correction or toning because then the printer will do what it wants instead of what you want. we'd sometimes get ugly magenta overcasts or brown ones bleh

I hope that helps a little

This post was edited by succulentdesire on May 18 2011 05:57pm

Colormunki photo and BAM. color accurate prints.

Wish I had the $400 to drop for it..

You must calibrate your monitor using a third party program. I personally use Spyder: http://spyder.datacolor.com/product-mc-s3express.php

Next, you must make sure the colors are accurate on your camera. I use the colorchecker passport for that.

Finally, you must change your monitor's profile depending on where you're printing. You can ask the printer for calibration details. If you're printing at like Wal Mart or Costco, GL, you'll never get it right. Try printing professionally.

I print my own stuff, faster, cheaper, and more convenient..

Guess I'm stuck with just adjusting settings on 4x6 proofs until I can get a calibration tool. Oh well.

This post was edited by kratos on May 18 2011 06:15pm

It's well worth the $400 though. It doesn't just calibrate your monitor and printer. It calibrates it to the ink and paper combination.

i think you could get ok results just by looking at what some photo looks like on your monitor and what it looked coming from printer, then try to find sort of safe zones for adjustments for brightness/contrast and color vibrance.

i made one print few months ago at this local shop, and it gave me bit too dark photo. next time i made some prints, i just adjusted for bit too low contrast and added a hint of brightness, just so much that it didnt look like completely crap on my screen, but looked just a bit off and the prints came out great. but the vibrance was still just a hint too low(first time i printed it was bw photo) on color prints, so next time i print, ill just add a hint of extra vibrance for color photos and it should be fine.

prints will naturally always look bit different than what it looked on your screen, simply because prints reflects light from ink and screen emits light, also the surface of print is different from your screen.

i suggest printing some color/brightness/contrast chart and see how it differs from your screen and adjust the photos according to it. but i suggest leaving the blacks just a hint more black(than you think would be the optimum) when printing, so that you dont overdo it and get gray blacks on the print.

I've been just using about +40 brightness and it seems to do the trick for the most part. The color is still a little off, maybe a bit more contrast would fix that. Thanks for the idea though, I had not though of just printing off a chart to compare.

40% brightness sounds like quite alot, try if you can get better results by lowering contrast just a bit and raising brightness just a bit.

what comes to colors, you should adjust rgb channels separately(or white balance if its about that), if its not just about color vibrance. but its easy to overdo the color adjustments, so only do really minor adjustments