Help with Canon Pixma Pro9000 color calibration

[kareneliza]

Hello! Can anyone help me with a basic, relatively jargon-free explanation of how to calibrate my office printer/computer so the color is even remotely accurate and consistent? We have a Canon Pro9000 and the color is wildly inaccurate compared to my screen as well as my Pantone Process color swatches. It is extremely bright and saturated, usually too magenta, and is also very unpredictable from one print to the next. I keep trying to look up color calibration and colorsync online to get at least a starting point but everything I find is very tech-speak-heavy and assumes a knowledge level that I sadly lack. I'm sorry to ask such a dumb question, but I'm at the end of my rope and my boss is ready to throw this nice printer out the window! Thanks, K

[billyPGA]

Hi Kareneliza,

First and foremost, you need to calibrate your monitor using a spectrophotometer or colorimeter to dajust white point and black point and fix the gradation through your videocard. Then if you are using photoshop, go to proof set up and choose the profile of the paper that you want to print on. Example, Canon glossy photo paper. Then you can have closer match.

Cheers!
billy:D

[Alan G]

I use a pro9000 and love it, because it's so darned accurate. With that in mind, here are some basic guidelines for non-technical users such as yourself:

1. There is an excellent guide to getting good color in the printer's online manual. Don't assume that any of it is inaccurate or a sales pitch. It's all very good advice and it all works as advertised.

2. Use a paper that the printer knows about. Until you get more savvy, stick with Canon or one of the listed fine art papers for all graphic and photo output, and

3. Always select the exact paper you're using in the print preferences. It defaults to Photo Paper Pro, but I'm guessing that's not what you're using most of the time.

4. When you print from Adobe apps, you're probably safest to tell the app NOT to color manage. Send everything as Adobe RGB and let the printer driver take care of it. That's not the best way, but it's the easiest and will probably give you the most consistent results. Go to Russel Brown's website and view his excellent video tutorials on printing. They apply to any printer. The key here is not to have both the app AND the printer trying to manage the color, because then it will ALWAYS be wrong. If the app manages the color, you have to turn off color management in the printer driver, and vice versa. It's simpler to let the driver do it.

5. Tweak only slightly, and carefully, using the manual color settings, until you get the result you want. I suggest you save your settings (the driver calls them profiles) for every type of job and each type of paper.

If you're printing from Photoshop, use the Easy PhotoPrint Pro plug-in. It goes directly to the printer and handles everything, although it's a bit limited as to formats. (There's a bug in the current version: if you have a non-pixel layer targeted when you invoke it, such as an adjustment layer or a vector layer, your image won't be recognized. Canon acknowledged it is a bug and sent me a complete ink set as a thank you for reporting it. How cool is that?)

This is the only printer in existence, as far as I know, that can reproduce the entire Adobe RGB gamut, so don't give up on it!

Canon's tech support people are terrific, by the way. If you call them, you'll get live, local(!) help, and all the people I've dealt with have been knowledgable and helpful.

Finally, if you need accurate color, there's no shortcut: you have to calibrate your monitor and each printer/paper combination you use. The good news is that the software/hardware out there is all good, and most of it's easy to use.

Good luck!

[PrintDriver]

^Excellent post Alan.
That is actually true of most 'desktop' printers where no RIP is involved.

I have an Epson Stylus Photo here that comes preeety darn close to true match if, and only if, one of the Epson paper options in the driver is used, the profile and quality options are selected, and the program color management is shut off. Sometimes the placed photos have to be set to Untagged CMYK. When using plain copy paper the machine shows head bands like a crazy thing.

[Alan G]

Not doing double color management is one of those things that's incredibly obvious in hindsight, but it's the commonest mistake I see people make with professional apps like Creative Suite. The drivers are mostly set up to cope with consumer-grade software that doesn't know anything about color profiles, so when you throw a color-managed workflow at them, they default to screwing up the color. Looking back at the original post, I see the tell-tale indicator: a magenta cast. That's the number one sign of double color management, in my experience.

[Kesh]

I have this same printer (just got it recently) and I just figured out to set it to send Adobe RGB. Before I wasn't sure what to do and the colors were too light or too saturated. It even printed with the ugly banding on solid colors.
When I set it to Adobe RGB in the properties it prints fine, very close to the screen and no banding. Why is this?? Especially the no banding part.
I also have my monitor calibrated with a Spyder2Pro thingie.

[Alan G]

All desktop printers are basically RGB devices, like a monitor. It's how they (and specifically the printer drivers) are designed, because they are primarily marketed as photo printers. The drivers that come with the printer don't know how to interpret CMYK from a program, but they try their best. Unfortunately, as programmers say, "the result is undefined." This is programmer speak for "Anything could happen. About the only sure thing is that it won't be what you wanted."

Banding can happen under other circumstances, too. If you use the wrong paper type setting, the printer will end up putting too much or too little ink down, at the wrong speed, and solid areas will not reproduce well. That's one reason why using the specified papers for a printer is important. Every paper takes up the dye or pigment differently. It spreads more on some than on others. Some papers (such as high-quality glossy) need much less ink that others. Every paper reflects light a little differently, so the balance of different ink colors has to be adjusted slightly for each type so as to give the correct appearance. If you print a set of grey and colored rectangles on each of several different papers, keeping everything else the same throughout, you'll see that the colors look different on each type of paper.

Not that this applies to you, but one of the worst "economies" people make is to use off-brand inks. Not only do they not produce accurate color (unless you create a new set of profiles), they are notorious for clogging print heads and otherwise messing up the works. They frequently create banding and other artifacts that the user then blames on the printer, because the print head was designed around an exact spec that the off-brand ink doesn't meet.

[davida6612]

I use CS2 and let Photoshop do color management. I use Ilford papers, and have downloaded drivers from the Ilford site. I set the Canon to Manual - no color management. That said, the selected paper still seems to make a difference. Also, many prints come out too dark vs what's on my screen. I calibrated my monitor with a Spider. I've also been trying to use off-brand paper from Costco, always comes out with a reddish hue, despite going through calibration procedures. Is there any definitive and detailed manifest out there that addresses how to get exact color matches on this printer? Appreciate any insight you can offer.
Dave Owens:confused:

I use a pro9000 and love it, because it's so darned accurate. With that in mind, here are some basic guidelines for non-technical users such as yourself:

1. There is an excellent guide to getting good color in the printer's online manual. Don't assume that any of it is inaccurate or a sales pitch. It's all very good advice and it all works as advertised.

2. Use a paper that the printer knows about. Until you get more savvy, stick with Canon or one of the listed fine art papers for all graphic and photo output, and

3. Always select the exact paper you're using in the print preferences. It defaults to Photo Paper Pro, but I'm guessing that's not what you're using most of the time.

4. When you print from Adobe apps, you're probably safest to tell the app NOT to color manage. Send everything as Adobe RGB and let the printer driver take care of it. That's not the best way, but it's the easiest and will probably give you the most consistent results. Go to Russel Brown's website and view his excellent video tutorials on printing. They apply to any printer. The key here is not to have both the app AND the printer trying to manage the color, because then it will ALWAYS be wrong. If the app manages the color, you have to turn off color management in the printer driver, and vice versa. It's simpler to let the driver do it.

5. Tweak only slightly, and carefully, using the manual color settings, until you get the result you want. I suggest you save your settings (the driver calls them profiles) for every type of job and each type of paper.

If you're printing from Photoshop, use the Easy PhotoPrint Pro plug-in. It goes directly to the printer and handles everything, although it's a bit limited as to formats. (There's a bug in the current version: if you have a non-pixel layer targeted when you invoke it, such as an adjustment layer or a vector layer, your image won't be recognized. Canon acknowledged it is a bug and sent me a complete ink set as a thank you for reporting it. How cool is that?)

This is the only printer in existence, as far as I know, that can reproduce the entire Adobe RGB gamut, so don't give up on it!

Canon's tech support people are terrific, by the way. If you call them, you'll get live, local(!) help, and all the people I've dealt with have been knowledgable and helpful.

Finally, if you need accurate color, there's no shortcut: you have to calibrate your monitor and each printer/paper combination you use. The good news is that the software/hardware out there is all good, and most of it's easy to use.

Good luck!

[Alan G]

I use CS2 and let Photoshop do color management. I use Ilford papers, and have downloaded drivers from the Ilford site. I set the Canon to Manual - no color management. That said, the selected paper still seems to make a difference.

You don't say if the profiles you downloaded are for the Pro9000. Assuming that is the case, also check the Ilford site for the recommendations on printer settings for the Pro9000 with the particular papers that you're using.

Color profiles are not the same thing as paper types. The paper type setting DOES affect how the printer reproduces images, because the amount, speed of delivery, and proportions of inks are different for optimum results on different media (true of any printer). The same color profile requires different physical delivery of ink to get proper renderings on gloss, satin, or matte paper. Setting the printer driver for Matte paper (or worse, Plain Paper) when you have glossy paper loaded will result in far too much ink being delivered and the result will be awful.

Ilford gives you the optimum paper type to select in the printer driver for each type of Ilford paper. They recommend color set to "Auto," but you will be using your workflow so that you'll turn off color management in the driver.

Hope this helps.