Calibrating New Printer and Mac

[MammaMonkey]

Hi Everyone,
Thank you in advance for any information you can provide here!

I recently bought a new Canon Pixma Pro 9000 Mark II printer for use with my iMac. On my iMac, I use CS3 and Lightroom 2. I am a novice with the software.

The problem I am having is that the pictures coming out of my printer are not as vivid as they appear on my screen. I'm guessing this has something to do with calibration and or color profiles, but I have no idea where to start. Is it the printer? The Mac? Or both?

Please, if you have any answers, I would appreciate they be in the simplest terms possible.

I am so excited to have all of these tools at my disposal, and yet the results are disappointing! And even more frustrating is the fact that some pictures seem OK when printed!

Thank You!

Lisa

[CaptainNH]

First of all, congratulations on the 9000, it really is an excellent printer, however, it does need setting up carefully - there's a lot of ways to affect the final colour balance of your final prints between pressing the shutter release and looking at your work on paper.

My experience of the 9000 is that it is quite sensitive to the type of paper you are putting through it - it needs to know what you're using and, if it doesn't "know" your paper, then you need to profile it.

Canon has a good summary of colour management in this document Colour Management.

Have a careful read of the manual for the printer too, there's some very detailed information in there about setting up your printer with colour in mind.

I'm afraid that the only way that you are going to achieve consistantly reliable results, from camera to monitor to paper, is to properly calibrate both your monitor and printer, AND to set your white balance manually each time. It can be a time consuming and costly process - google Spyder3 Studio or ColorMunki to see what you might be in for.

Good luck!

[teaking]

I would advise looking into colour management google has some great articles you are going to need a fully colour managed workflow from camera to print.

I would look at what colour space your going to shoot in first and then work forwards from their. Some prefer Adobe RGB which you have to be careful with as it can cause colours to look dull if your not fully aware of what your doing others like sRGB theres no real answer its a debated subject haha.

Then make sure you have everything profiled on your system try to stick to the same paper also to maintain accurate results, and re profile your equipment every so often.