Printer/Monitor calibration?

[Becky]

I'm currently putting together a small scale portfolio of my work... I have a great A3 printer, Canon i9950 and am for this task using a Macbook.

I didn't imagine I'd have any huge issues here, but the difference between the brightness/blackness between my screen and the prints is pretty drastic. The prints really only become acceptable when I up the brightness/fiddle with the levels of my photos, and by doing so they look awful on screen... but look a lot better on paper. It is however, quite a trial and error method and aside from being sick of wasting expensive paper its just a daft way of working.

I don't really want to resort to buying calibration hardware such as pantone colorvision (though I hear its pretty decent)...

Truthfully, my screen is usually set to maximum brightness, but this is also the case with a windows based laptop I also use, and I have never had the same issues with screen/print differences.

I don't know much about Canon colour management, but I'll go into all that if it looks like I have to. Is it a case of Canon printer/ink and paper to be closest to accuracy in this case?

Any thoughts?... or is this just going to be another random hitch in my Mac-move?!

 

[Big Mike]

I thought I could get away without monitor calibration...but I couldn't. When I first did it, the difference was amazing.

I haven't calibrated my Canon printer but using Canon paper seems to give me very nice prints. I tried some cheaper paper and the results were terrible.

If you really want to be accurate, calibrating both the monitor and the printer is the way to go.

 

[Garbz]

The differences in brightness / blacks can be largely to do with the fact that paper is not backlit. Do you use Photoshop? If so you can setup a printer proof which with a single keystroke will show what the images looks like with the converted printer colour profile and dulled down whites and blacks.

This is the closest I have come to getting exactly what I see on the screen out of the printer.

 

[glaston]

This might be a no-brainer for you, but deserves mention.

You ARE converting from RGB to CMYK before printing right?

 

[D-50]

Do you really eed to convert to CMYK before printing? I experience the same exactly problem with brightness, I have found if I increase my brightness to +22 to +30 before printing the result is very close to my monitor but I would also like to fix the probleminstead of just working around it.