I love taking pictures and creating graphics. I can spend hours editing photos and crafting kaleidoscopes and other interesting things in Photoshop. I have super quality, top of the line (when I purchased it) Canon i9900 wideformat photo printer that I couldn’t have been more excited to bring home and play with. But after several attempts, it wasn’t long until I rarely printed any of my images.

Printing has always been a frustrating process. Pictures have always turned out too dark, too low-contrast or with horrible color casts. Getting a good print always meant a lot of test copies or strips while I tweaked levels or curves and held my breath as the print came out. It never looked like it did on my screen. I wasted way too much ink, paper and time trying everything from installing new printer drivers, screen calibration techniques, and untold combinations of printer settings and profiles. And I was always disappointed. Until yesterday.

I think I have finally figured out a way to make my prints come out reasonably close to what I see on my monitor and it’s a method that seems to work consistantly across different types of pictures with different color combinations. I wanted to share what I found since I’m sure I am not the only Canon I-Series printer owner who’s had the same types of frustrations and Canon doesn’t seem to offer much documentation or help on how to optimize your prints. Having said that, you still may have to do some tweaking (using my exact numbers may just get you in the ballpark) but the core of the “secret” should be easy to apply to your own prints.

Prepping your image for print

1. Calibrate your monitor. This is very important. There are many methods to do this. Photoshop comes with Adobe Gamma as one alternative, for instance. If you have access to one, I highly suggest using the Spyder 2, which is what I was able to do. If you can’t calibrate your monitor, there’s no point in continuing the steps. You’ve got to have a decent representation of colors on your screen.
2. Open your image in Photoshop. Go to Edit->Assign Profile. If it’s not already selected as your Working RGB, choose sRGB ICE61966-2.1.
   
   This step has many schools of thought, but again, this is what worked for me.
3. Do whatever adjustments to the image to make it look how you would like it to look once printed such as color adjustments, levels, curves, cropping, etc.
4. Click on the top layer in your layers list and create a new Levels adjustment layer on top of it: Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Levels
5. With RGB selected in the Channel list, enter 1.35 in the middle box for Input Levels
   
6. Here’s the secret! For each of the Channels (Red, Green, Blue but not RGB), if the histogram (black wave looking thing) doesn’t reach all the way to the right, slide the little white triangle towards the left until it meets the border of the histogram. See the next two images for details (my example picture only needed Green and Blue adjusted).
   
   
   Update: After testing some more images where the histogram didn’t span all the way to the left (unlike my first tests), I have found that you should also move the black triangle on the left if it doesn’t border the histogram edges.
7. This step may vary depending on the picture. I have found that adjusting the midtone Input Levels in the Green channel down (within the range from 0.90 to 0.75) and the Blue channel up (up to about 1.10) seems to correct some color casts. This seems to depend on which colors I want to tone down in the print and is the main thing you’ll have to tweak if it doesn’t come out right the first time.
   Update: I seem to have found a pattern here… if you don’t have to move the the triangles in the histogram, leave the value at 1.00, otherwise use the values specified above fpr the appropriate channel. The midtone value for Red can also be changed, in the same value range as Green.
8. In the Options section on your Print->Print with Preview screen, make sure when you print that the Printer Profile chosen the same one that you chose for the image at the first step: sRGB ICE61966-2.1. Having the two profiles match seems to make a difference. Also, it is important that Let Photoshop Determine Colors is set for Color Handling.
   
9. On the Canon printer properties dialog, make sure that Color Adjustment is Manual so that the printer will trust Photoshop to make the color choices.
   
10. Print it out!

Your image will probably look pretty washed out on your screen. This is to be expected.

Screen without adjustment level	Screen with adjustment level

When you print and compare it to your monitor, make sure that you turn off (click the eye) the printing adjustment layer. Your print should look like the “original” without that layer. If it’s close but not quite, tweak the numbers for midtone Input Levels on the Blue and Green channels. After a few times you should get a feel for what those numbers need to be.

This is not a perfect method, but so far it has taken about 90% of the guesswork and frustration out of printing for me. Again, I don’t know that it will work for other people, so please let me know if it does or doesn’t! And please, print out some SMALL tests before you waste a lot of paper and ink! Good luck!