Printing colours more accurately

[htid]

I have a Canon MP540 and some Ilford Galerie Smooth Pearl paper and am trying to print a specific picture. When it's in Photoshop the colours are as I want them, however when I printed the picture, it came out darker and not as vivid as on screen. Now I know you can get really expensive calibration software, but is there any cheaper way to get a more realistic idea of the colours that will be printed? Do I need to alter the printer colour profiles, Photoshops colour profiles, or something else?

Cheers for any advice.

[Bobster]

you will either

1. need to spend $$ on printing lots of photographs and adjusting the print settings until they look like you thihnk they should
2. download the correct paper profile for your printer
3. buy one of those expensive calibrator thingies (you can pick up a pantone huey for about 70 notes) and still spend $$ on printing lots of photographs and adjusting the print settings until they look like you think they should
   or
4. goto your local lab and have them professionally done and then re-calibrate your screen on what you see in print

how does this look to you?

[Saracen]

One thing to be careful of is that you don't have multiple things trying to control colour calibration. If you've got Photoshop (or whatever) trying to do it, and the printer trying to do it's own thing, you're going to get strange results. It's worth, perhaps, checking that you don't have conflicts from existing settings.

Beyond that, you can get "canned" paper profiles for many popular papers from the manufacturers, but that won't help you if your monitor is badly calibrated, or not calibrated at all.

[brammers]

Michael Reichmann has a great video tutorial on this at luminous-landscape.com - 'from camera to print'. He goes on, and on, and on... but if you can sit through them his vids are gold - he and Jeff Schewe really know their stuff.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You will need to calibrate your screen. A good starting point would be the Colorvision Spyder 2 for under £60:

http://www.warehouseexpress.com/prod...px?sku=1012615

Also another problem is how good your screen is in the first place! If you have an IPS,PVA or MVA type LCD panel then these are the best types for image editing and they also tend to be 8 bit displays. If you have a TN type display they tend to be 6 bit displays. If you have a 6 bit display calibration will still help but these displays are the worst type for colour accuracy. The newer TN type displays are getting better but they are still not as good as the other panel types!!

[Bobster]

if you have a wide gamut display, then you'll want the Spyder 3..

[htid]

Thanks for the advice everyone - messed around and experimented a bit to no avail, so for now I'll leave it. I seem to think my dad has spyder so I'll ask him for it when I go home next weekend.

[colmo]

First step is to check Ilford's own library of ICC profiles:

http://www.ilford.com/profiles/index...p?type=profile

I don't think the MP540 in there, but one of the other Canon MP profiles may bear fruit.