Printing Images look horrible?

careyr69 · Jan 15, 2008

I've been searching on the web for a while and I just can't get my pictures to print well. I've just accepted the fact and have never tried to fix it much. Until I just received my prints back from Sears of my new born. They gave me a cd with the digital photos on it. I print them and they look amazing! They look exactly like they do in my windows image viewer.

Why don't my digital pictures from my camera look good when I print them, they are horrible. I've tried using color management of the printer, I just don't get it. I've tried using the ICC profile in photoshop, they are worse.

I have windows vista ultimate, photoshop cs3, and an hp photosmart printer. I don't even get good results when I open the photo in photoshop. In fact it looks worse when I open it in photoshop.

What's a good way to keep my color consistent and get it to print like it should?

Thanks

Sw1tchFX · Jan 15, 2008

what color space are you working in? The color gamut of a printer is very restricting. Do you have printer profiles? Is your monitor calibrated?

careyr69 · Jan 16, 2008

My printer does have three profiles that show up under the color management for the OS. All three of them don't look so great when I set them as the default color. So I downloaded the AdobeRGB1998 color profolie and tried it, still no luck.

The monitors were calibrated this morning. The big problem is that the image from Sears and the image from my 10.0 Olympus camera both look good in explorer. The Sears image is perfect when it prints and my digital camera ones do not.

Do the Sears images have an embedded ICC profile? How do I get my digital images to match the print quality of the Sears images?

Thanks,

Parkerman · Jan 16, 2008

What are your printed results looking like? To gray? Not enough color? or the color is just way off?

Could be old paper.. or just not a good quality paper being used. I tried printing off our HP photosmart printer the other day... And the pictures came out real faded looking, having a grayish tint to them. So, i swapped out the paper with some different and it make a worlds difference.

careyr69 · Jan 16, 2008

The color just looks way off. I actually printed one of those Sears images on the same paper and it was perfect.

Seems like my digital photos just don't have an embedded icc profile? Or my OS is handling them wrong. I'm clueless as to how to fix this.

It seems that if both images look great in windows image viewer, the sears photo and the digital camera photo, then they should both print well, but only the sears image prints as it looks.