Image great on screen but faded on print

Canon ImageRunner 5045... have tried many different paper types and some are better than others. Image is 300 dpi but not nearly as crisp and very faded and washed out when prints out compared to screen. Other images print ok and just had drums changed... thoughts? Will try to attach image (which I downsized for posting)

gg

 

The file may be outside the color gamut of the printer. Have you ever profiled the printer to understand which colors it can reproduce? If you did and you hve an ICC profile for it, you can preview it in Photoshop to see which colors are reproducible. Under View, set your proofing profile to be the printer profile and view the gamut warning.

Greg

 

Thank you Greg... Have been fiddling since I posted... also turned machine off and on to reset... and am getting better results... I think it just needed a reset as I noticed my black on the insde pages of booklet were also washed out... this printer is super finicky... but awesome when it works... lol

gg

 

Good luck!

Might not be a bad idea to run through a calibration with it as well.

Greg

 

Hi - Brand new to this forum. I just got a Canon C5045 printer. I'm on a brand new mac, I use In Design & Photo Shop. Lots of experience laying out newspapers, but clueless with this printer. I've spent days testing print out from Indesign and I can't seem to get a great print out. When I copy something the out put is amazing. I have a bunch of different paper stocks in the office. I've tried alot of different things in the printer settings on my mac and designating different paper types. Bottom line is I need to print a bunch of posters on 11 x 17 32 lb hammer mill stock. What is my fastest path and what settings should I do. I'm starting to go nuts with all these tests. Jeff in Colorado.

 

The techs I'm working with who got the machine set up, don't seem to know the paper or the print settings part of this process. Any tips or help would be great. I'm running out of time to get this project done. PDF's are printing pretty good, but I'd like the quality I get with a simple copy. Imagine that. Thanks

 

Hi billinxs,

You may want to consider giving Canon a call directly. I had a Brother office printer that no matter what I did, the color output was pitiful. I gave their support a call and they recommended a few different settings which dramatically improved the color quality. These were settings in the driver that I had seen but didn't realize how they could impact the output.

Regards,
Greg

 

Canon

Thanks - I'm slowly figuring out the tricks. But I just may call Canon directly.
Jeff

 

Have you downloaded and set the canon's color profile in your color settings? Are you trying to simulate press CMYK or get the widest color gamut out of the canon?

 

Canon

The initial driver set up was done by my printer sales person. I can see the two settings for Canon when I print out of In Design. I don't care if my files need to be CMYK or RGB. I just need to find the fastest path to a consistent out put. If I print straight from In Design and RGB photo it doesn't look that good - flat and just muddy. If I PDF that same photo in In Design and print from Acrobat, the quality is much better but I still think it can be even better. The best results I get is when I just click a RBG jpg and it opens in preview mode on a mac, then I print from there and I get some nice output. However the preview program has lots of limitations. If I print from photoshop I get alot of weird warnings that I haven't been able to figure out about color profiles etc. Unfortunately printing from photoshop is the worst and it really needs to be the best. Learning curve is steep here or I'm possibly clueless. I've tried many, may options, but after awhile you almost forget which one works unless you take alot of notes. Shouldn't have to be this hard. Plus I'm getting some banding lines that I can see when I hold the print out to the light. I had my tech come in to repair it and she said that she thought it was the paper. I'm pretty picky, however, it's tough to sell a job to someone when you know there are these banding lines on the product that I don't think need to be there.

 

It's hard to diagnose without seeing it.

Color profiles and rip settings can sometimes be frustrating when not cooperating.

Since the RGB jpg file printed directly from another program is printing the best, I'd guess not rip setting but color profile and settings in the adobe apps. Would have to see output and color settings to offer any better advice.

(Even when color settings are "correct" so most rgb photos print optimally, I still sometimes have to manually convert one or two rgb files to cmyk to handle out of gamut colors the way I want for the particular image. In an hour or so it should be possible to get color settings so the majority of general photos will print very well from rgb to the printers cmyk profile.)