Soft prints from HP B8850 printer

[ssddjj]

From the reviews I thought that output from the HP B8850 printer should be very good, but I am generally not happy with the prints.

I use either Panasonic FZ28 or FZ38 cameras. I use a Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop to edit the photos. The screen has been calibrated using Spyder2. I use Photoshop CS4 to do basic editing of the photos like the levels, cropping. I soft proof the photos using relative colorimetric. The photos are generally taken outdoors with many being macros but others being zoomed to up to 18x, e.g. of birds.

When I print the photos they are much less vibrant than the originals and show less detail/sharpness. The dpi is generally between 200 and 300 depending on how much the photos have been cropped.

The printer should be calibrating itself all the time.

Thanks for your help.

[teaking]

Your monitor is calibrated, so you can rule that out the obvious questions are do you use sRGB or aRGB or some other colour profile and if so is this set in photoshop or your editor. The next step would be to make sure you have a colour profile for your printer usualy on the CD or from their website and make sure the correct profile is set in your editor and in your OS. And finaly have you set your editor to handle the colour management if so make sure any colour management in your printer driver is switched off so your not doubling that process up.

Moving on from there the other reasons could be that the standard printer profile is not accurate enough and you may need to profile your printer for a custom profile, paper combinations can also have an effect on colour.

As for sharpness there is a thread in this forum relating to print sharpness, which is also referred to as output sharpening which is device specific you may be able to find this out for your specific printer.... but in general at 50% your images will look over sharpened on the screen but print out sharp. Just to make this a little longer lol remember that digital camera will cause some softening to your images and some sharpening may be needed to be applied to bring this back.

[ssddjj]

Thanks for your reply.

I have been using Adobe RGB (1998) colour space in Photoshop CS4. The cameras have sRGB colour space. I have recently read that using Adobe RGB (1998) makes little difference (mainly in the shadows) and so it is not worth using. So, yesterday I changed the colour space in Photoshop to sRGB.

I use the HP Advanced Photo Paper Glossy with the associated printer profile in Photoshop. I am not sure what you mean about making sure that this profile is set up in the OS.

I have made sure that colour management is done by Photoshop and not the printer driver.

I am going to try getting a custom printer profile from Pure Profiles.

[teaking]

I think I may have worded it wrong by saying OS, and im not 100% sure but in your printers driver at least in windows xp there is a colour management option where you can choose an ICC or ICM profile for your printer this idealy should be the one for your printer.

Otherwise Photoshop is using the Printers profile but your printer is not, I could be wrong on that though maybe someone could confirm that.