Graphic Printing

Advice and Recommendations

The material on this page was provided by John Parks.

Make sure that your printer driver software is up to date. Not all printer drivers are able to do all things that their PC counterparts do. For example, the Epson 2200 will not do manual feed on thick papers in OS-X, put it works just fine on OS-9.

Use the correct paper for your printer and your printing task. The printer manufacturers recommend certain papers for their printers because there are differences in papers like drying time, driver speed, feed rate, and absorption. Papers other than those recommended may not provide the same quality or even cause damage to the printer jets. However it can be worth trying alternative papers as sometimes you can find one that is even better.

Some printers will allow you to adjust the colors if you do not like the printing on you paper of choice.

When I bought my computer I was given a printer free of charge. The "free" printer was expensive because of the high rate of ink consumption. When you run out of one color (such as black) in the cartridge, the whole cartridge needs to be replaced. (Note from the webmaster - most printers have a separate black cartridge now to alleviate this problem.) Better printers cost more, but have separate ink cartridges for each color so that only one color has to be replaced when it runs out - quite a saving!

Lower priced ink jet printers use fewer droplets for a given area and use larger drops of ink. These printer provide less detail and less highlights for printing photographs.

Higher resolution, such as 1440 dpi (dots per inch) will use smaller drops of ink to provide the higher resolution and therefore higher quality photographs. The speed with which a printer produces a photograph is usually related to the price of the printer. Higher priced printers are generally faster than the cheaper ones. The speed of printing black and white pages is usually much faster that printing color pages - be sure to find out which the manufacturer is quoting - they should provide both figures.

Print Life

Under ideal conditions where photographs are framed under glass and displayed out of direct sunlight and in steady humidities, prints created in the digital darkroom with dye based inks will last about 10 to 25 years whereas pigment based inks may last for 100 years. These assume you use acid free papers.

Color Matching of Screens and Printers

Usually the manufacturer of the printers will match the setting to the paper that they recommend. However, your monitor be adjusted to show different colors so that digitized slides or photographs appear differently than the originals.

There are two solutions to color matching:

Be sure that all your devices are using an ICC profile matching
Run test strip prints and adjust the color in the printer driver. Not all printers have this feature so looking for it in future printer purchases is recommended. My Epson 2200 does not let me do this.

When adjusting colors in the printer driver, remember that red and cyan are paired, magenta and green are paired, and yellow and blue are paired. Adding one color is equivalent to subtracting its corollary. Conversely, subtracting one color is equivalent to adding its corollary. Computer display colors are made up of Red, Green and Blue, whereas printer colors are usually made up with Cyan, Magenta and Yellow.

Your scanner and monitor may allow you to set your ICC profiles to match, but not all devices carry the same profiles. Profiles come from standard image that is measured for each device. Computer hardware and software manufacturers have standard images that they use such as SRGB (also used in cameras), and Adobe RGB (used in Photoshop and many printers). You should also learn to use ColorSync Utility, DigitalColor Meter, and Display Calibrator all of which can be found in the Applications/Utilities folder of OS-X systems.

Another way to get colors to match is to use a profiling tool such as "Monaco Optix" from Monaco Systems. They will provide color slides and printed cards so you can get your scanner and monitor on the same ICC color profile.