I knew paper mattered but not this much!

[billtils]

Disclaimer first: This came about during a within-family discussion on the "Solitude" image I posted here some weeks ago. One member wasn't too keen on the textured matte finish of the Hanehmuhle German Etching paper and thought it a bit cool too. So I ran off a copy on Pinnacle Premium Silk Baryta expecting a difference but not this much!

The prints were made on a Canon Pro 100S and with the correct ICC profile.

The prints were photographed with my iPhone, not edited in any way other than cropping, and as mentioned the intent was to assist family discussion not as a rigorous comparison.


Original digital

[




Hahnemule print





Pinnacle print

[Manfred M]

Bill - there is something not quite right here. I do a lot of printing and I never see differences nearly that noticeable between different papers. I have never used either of these papers, so I cannot comment on them.

There is often a small but noticeable difference between what I see in the screen and what the paper is capable of reproducing, but that tends to be in the saturated colours and of course the differences between an additive, transmitted light RGB process and a subtractive, reflected light, CMYK process.

The only time I see something that different is in cases where the print medium base has a distinct tone.

This looks like a workflow issue; have you disabled the printer from using its internal profile and has the paper ICC profile been properly activated?

[LenR]

Bill, I have no experience with the papers you have used but do not believe the difference should be so noticeable.
I also use a Canon printer, although not the 100S. Just a thought, in the printers " Properties" function under Colour/Manual Adjustments/Matching do you have it set to "None" This will allow the printer to use the ICC rather than the driver.

[DanK]

Bill,

I agree with Manfred and Len--something is wrong. It's often the case that color gamut differs (narrower with uncoated papers), but the color balance should otherwise be very similar.

Len's comment applies to any decent software. You should set the software to control color, which is often where you select the appropriate ICC. What Len is referring to is in the Windows print dialog that comes up with any software, if you are using Windows. When that comes up, select "properties" next to the printer name. From there, you need to go to the second tab from the left, if I recall. (I'm not on the right computer now and can't see.) There will be a section on color matching, and you have to select "none". If you don't, the printer also try to control color, and you get what is sometimes called "double profiling".

If that's already set correctly, let us know what software you are using. Someone who uses the same software may be able to find out what's amiss.

Dan

What software are you printing from

[billtils]

Manfred, Len and Dan

Thanks for your input. I have a friend who is a retired senior IT engineer who worked in customer support for major commercial installations of the company's software. He never tires of telling me that in 95% of the cases he had to deal with the issue was operator error, not the software. My problem seems to be a bit of a hybrid.

I use two editors, CaptureOne Pro and Affinity Photo, the former mainly because of its inbuilt library function and decent default RAW conversion, and the latter for all my serious editing and (most of the time) printing. I opened the image in AP this morning, selected the image file, set the ICC profile and printed, with this result ...




... pretty much what I had expected.

When I opened CaptureOne and set it up to print, the result was what we saw in the first post. I suppose my friend would tell me "operator error again" in that I printed from the "wrong" program but that doesn't explain the difference. FWIW, I occasionally do print from CaptureOne when it's for a quick and easy "domestic" print, and have not found anything that was noticeably adrift from what I saw on the computer screen.

Some years ago I would have treated this as a challenge and spent however much time and effort it required to get to the root cause, but that was then, this is now, and my normal workflow worked just fine.

I am going to use this image in a couple of competitions and send a mounted version to my daughter - the photograph was taken when my wife and I were on a short break at a hotel in Pitlochry thanks to a gift from her.

[DanK]

Well, the mystery is one step closer to resolution....

I agree with the operator error suggestion, but in my experience (working in large part with statistical software), the percentage is a lot higher than 95%. My first experience with this was back in the 1970s, when I had to prepare punch cards for runs that were done overnight on an IBM mainframe. Each error cost one day. The card deck started with JCL (job control language) code that was very cryptic. One day, after numerous iterations, I went up to the attendant and insisted that something was wrong because my code was correct. She silently took the JCL cards off the front, paged through them, and then pointed to a part of one line and said "there".

I find it unlikely that either of these software packages isn't capable of reasonably accurate printing, although I never use either, so perhaps I'm wrong. I suggest you download a color test image and print it using both software packages. That will show you which is off, and you can either avoid it or figure out what you are doing wrong with that one. The image I use, the Outback Print Image, seems not to be available any more, but there are a bunch listed with links here: https://www.northlight-images.co.uk/...r-test-images/

[DanK]

I'm printing this morning, so I have a chance to make concrete what Len and I said about Windows print setting.

The screenshot below shows what you need. You first select "properties" from the Windows print dialog box at the upper left. You then choose the "main" tab, which is second from the left. From there, you select the "matching" tab, which is again second from the left. You select "none" in this dialog to avoid double-profiling.

What you are doing when you hit "properties" in the first box is accessing Canon's printer firmware. The second and third dialogs in the screen shot are Canon's firmware. It looks very similar with every Canon photo printer I have used, including the 100.

Dan

[billtils]

Dan - how did you upload the screenshots of your Canon settings? I made a PSD of mine (the successful ones from affinity Photo) but failed in my effort to upload here.

[DanK]

Bill,

What I do is a bit of a nuisance.

First, I take a screen shot using the Windows Snip & Sketch app. I save that as a JPEG and upload it to a Smugmug gallery that doesn't show up on my website. I then paste a link to it here. I use this frequently, e.g., if I want to show a histogram from an image, etc.

If Snip & Sketch doesn't show up on your start menu, click on the windows symbol on the toolbar and start typing the app name. It will show up by the time you get to n or i.

Dan

[billtils]

Thanks Dan - here are screenshots of the successful (Affinity Photo) settings FYI. Was not able to replicate the "nasty" in CaptureOne exactly and am happy to draw a line under it now.

[DanK]

Thanks Dan - here are screenshots of the successful (Affinity Photo) settings FYI. Was not able to replicate the "nasty" in CaptureOne exactly and am happy to draw a line under it now.

Bill,

There's something wrong with your link. I can see the attachment in small form on my phone, but when I try to go to it on my computer, it hangs. If I go to the embedded link, https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...6659c634_c.jpg, I get a blank page with this message: "These aren't the droids you're looking for."

Dan

[DanK]

Weird. Looking at my reply on my iPad, I can see the screenshots.

Not knowing that software, I might be off base, but I think it's OK. I assume that the "ColorSync" option means that the software controls the printer. You have the ICC specified. I don't know whether the media type is correct, but the paper manufacturer should have something that says, and in any case, this primarily controls how much ink is laid down, so it shouldn't have a major effect on color balance.

Even with these settings, you still have to set the printer's settings correctly via the Windows print dialog, as described in post # 7.

[billtils]

Dan

There are no common elements in the software we use , so here's the tale in text:

Computer: iMac running the latest version of MacOS and calibrated (Xrite)
Raw (NEF) development and library: CaptureOne Pro 23*
All other edits and printing: Affinity Photo 2.1.0*

Printer: Canon PRO-100S

Paper: Pinnacle Premium Silk Baryta from Paperspectrum

Color Matching: Mac ColorSync, with Profile Pinnacle_Canon Pro 100_Premium Silk Baryta, which essentially means colour matching is controlled from the computer settings; there is an alternate "Canon Color Matching" that I have never tried (and don't know what it does).

Quality & Media: Photo Paper Plus Semi-gloss

Print Quality: High (I use Standard for matte papers).

Footnote to "*": There's no outstanding reason for these choices - they are historical and I have kept them because I know them, own them outright, and they do what I want to my satisfaction. I did use Adobe CC for about 9 months when I was President of the local camera club 3 years ago - just so I had experience with what several of the other members used - I gave up after less than a year.

[DanK]

Ah, a Mac user. Sorry, this limits a great deal what I know. When my wife brought home a Mac Air years ago, when they were new, I thought it was a truly nifty little computer, but after playing with it a bit, I decided that learning my way around a third operating system (I was using Linux as well as Windows) was more than I was willing to take on.

However, I have a very vague recollection of someone posting that the process I described for avoiding double profiling does not apply to Macs. I even more vaguely recollect someone saying that this extra step isn't needed. But I'm ignorant about this, so don't take my word. Perhaps another Mac user here can weigh in.