how to print well saturated bluebell photos

[dutyhog]

I've recently made several images that I like of a classic subject - bluebells under trees. When I print them (or just soft proof) their dark blue colour isn't saturated enough for any of the papers I've looked at. I assume that's because my printer only has cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, yellow and various black inks, so the deep blues are outside its gamut.

I've looked at the usual Fuji icc profile that processing houses print from, and it's no better at blue than my printer.

Does anyone know of a UK processor who will print my images on a printer that has a blue cartridge?

Gordon

[Manfred M]

I'm not aware of any high end photo printers that have a blue cartridge. The 11 cartridge units I have looked at seem to have green and orange in addition to the cartridges you have listed (which are the same as what I have on my printer).

[Black Pearl]

You might be best off speaking to someone at Loxley Colour or Colorworld or another professional lab to see how they deal with them and/or organising sending some test images.

[DanK]

I'm not aware of any high end photo printers that have a blue cartridge. The 11 cartridge units I have looked at seem to have green and orange in addition to the cartridges you have listed (which are the same as what I have on my printer).

My printers aren't high-end, but none has a blue cartridge. They have cyan, in some cases two cyans. None of mine has orange, and only my old Pixma Pro 9000I had green. My current photo printer, a Pro-100, has two cyans, two magentas, two grays, a black, and a yellow.

My guess is that this is a paper issue. Your software may be able to show whether it is out of gamut (Lightroom does). If not, it may be correctable by increasing saturation in the soft-proof copy. Another way to diagnose this, if you haven't done this already, would be to soft-proof for a wide-gamut coated paper, like a glossy or even a luster.

[rpcrowe]

I often get prints that look better saturated when printing on glossy paper rather than matte. The most saturated looking images are when I print on metallic paper...

[dutyhog]

My printers aren't high-end, but none has a blue cartridge..

My guess is that this is a paper issue. Your software may be able to show whether it is out of gamut (Lightroom does). If not, it may be correctable by increasing saturation in the soft-proof copy. Another way to diagnose this, if you haven't done this already, would be to soft-proof for a wide-gamut coated paper, like a glossy or even a luster.

Thank all for the replies. I should have made it clear that I soft proofed (in Photoshop) for several types of high gloss, barytas etc, and adjusted saturation, contrast etc, but all showed out-of-gamut for my deep blues. That was in Adobe RGB. Even converting the image to sRGB (which I wouldn't want to do for serious printing) there were large patches of the blue shown out-of-gamut.

The best paper for this that I found in my list of icc profiles for my HP printer with Vivera inks was HP Advanced Photo Glossy. A Hahnemuhle Baryta was next.

There are printers with blue inks, eg in the HP Designjet Z series.

[Manfred M]

There are printers with blue inks, eg in the HP Designjet Z series.

It must be a different model than the one I used at work. We had the 44" models for printing engineering drawings and these were 8 cartridge design (four cartridges on each side); no blue.

Have you tried working in ProPhoto? The colour space is wider than AdobeRGB and printers with more than 4 cartridges will be able to print a wider colour space than the AdobeRGB.

[dutyhog]

It must be a different model than the one I used at work. We had the 44" models for printing engineering drawings and these were 8 cartridge design (four cartridges on each side); no blue.

Z3100 and Z3200 models have 12 cartridges, including blue cartridges C9458A. Maybe a UK printing house has one, but I don't know how to find out apart from more internet trawling and emailing them (as I've done to Loxley this evening).

The Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000 has red and blue as well as the usual ink colours.

Have you tried working in ProPhoto? The colour space is wider than AdobeRGB and printers with more than 4 cartridges will be able to print a wider colour space than the AdobeRGB.

I did, but it makes no difference to the range of out-of-gamut blues, which seem to depend on the ink set and the paper. The problem is with RGB values approx R = 0 to 55, G = 0 to 95, B = 255.

[Shadowman]

I've recently made several images that I like of a classic subject - bluebells under trees. When I print them (or just soft proof) their dark blue colour isn't saturated enough for any of the papers I've looked at. I assume that's because my printer only has cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, yellow and various black inks, so the deep blues are outside its gamut.

Does anyone know of a UK processor who will print my images on a printer that has a blue cartridge?

Gordon

I'd just email or call and see what they can offer.

http://dscolourlabs.co.uk/about/Technical_Support