Printing Help

[rjb_FotoTaker]

What is the trick to printing great, bright and colorful pictures?
I am using a Kodak Professional 1400 and the pictures are on the dark side.
There are so many options that I don't know where to start. The picture looks fine on screen. In the print setting there are all the print style choices such as RGB, Kodak 1400, System Controlled, Ect. I have played with a few but not really getting the look that I think this printer is capable of.
Also the pics that I am printing were shot in JPEG mode instead of RAW, Could that have anything to do with it.
Using Sony Alpha DSLR, a MacBook, and Aperture.

[Nicole]

Two possible things to try:
1. Screen calibration
2. Camera settings

First, have you made sure that your screen is calibrated? There's an option on your Mac System Preferences under the Displays buttton. If you click the "color" option within displays, there's a button to calibrate your display. The steps are described really thoroughly on this ColorSync website. If you already know all this info about screen calibrataion, my apologies.

Second, have you made sure that your camera is shooting in sRGB and not something like CMYK? Or equally, that you're not editing in one colour profile and printing in another? If you haven't changed any of your settings then this probably isn't it, but just something else that I thought of.

The best way to make sure that your prints come out the way they are on the screen is to use the same colour profile on your printer that you are on your monitor, so if you calibrate your monitor for sRGB, make sure that your printer is also printing in sRGB.

That's all I can think of at the moment, but the problem is hopefully just something simple like that. Try calibrating (or re-calibrating) your screen and see if that helps, and make sure you're printing in the same colour profile that you're editing in. Good luck

[smc1377]

Nicole's advice would have been what I'd first suggest.

Some other useful bits of information that you could give us.

- Can you print an untouched photo straight from your camera? How does that look?

- If it still looks bad, can you print someone else's high quality picture and let us know how it looks?

The first question is to determine if the pictures are ok straight from the camera. My guess is that they are fine from the camera and it's when you are trying to make them look "nice" on screen that the quality degrades. But if the quality from the camera is still bad, the second test would be to see if there's just something wrong with your printer or your print driver.

[rjb_FotoTaker]

Those all were some great tips, I re-cal my screen and did find an updated driver for the printer. Thanks again to you both for the rapid help.