Desperate Help needed gents please !!

Hi All

Last night I decided I had got my portrait /lighting shot ready for print after a final few tweaks. The first few photos I printed yesterday looked perfect. By this I mean skin tone looked very natural and so did the hair.

Now the colour has gone wrong. It looks to strong, over saturated or what ever you want to call it. I appreciate I can just alter the saturation or colour in PS but I dont really want to mess with it anymore. I have not messed with the photos colour settings at all. I even printed the untweaked version from yesterday to see if that was the problem.

I think it is to to with colour profiles but this is an area I don't fully understand. I did try messing with the profiles for photoshop and the printer in desperation but it has made no difference if anything worse.

I then uninstalled both photoshop and printer to see if this would solve the problem by re installing to default but it is still the same. One thing I have noticed is when viewing the image in photoshop they like more natural a little murky maybe but when I view the same saved image with windows viewer they look like this over saturated look. I must point out that the prints yesterday came out in between and in my eyes perfect.

I realise something is wrong and so I spent 3 hours and waisted 30 sheets of A4 photo photo paper and god knows how much ink trying to get it right.

Finally many of you will say adjust the adobe gamma in control panel or set up printer and PC profile but I don't really understand how this is done correctly. If some has the time a step by step solution would be very much appreciated. Or are there any other solutions or tests I can try.

I know there have been other posts over colour caliberation but to be honest it's a mine field of imformation which does lose me a little. All I want is for my prints to look ok again.

My printer is a Canon IP4300

If anybody is willing to help and needs to know my current settings please let me know and I will gladly post them.

Cheers guys

PS I only have 3 days to get my print in for the exam

Pete

When the windows viewer looks over-saturated I think it is the screen profile.
Right-click on the empty screen, properties, advanced, color or something like that. Select the correct monitor profile.

Couple of points

Adobe Gamma won't work properly on LCD screens

Make sure that either Adobe or the printer are controling the output not both otherwise the image is colour matched twice

Also do other images print correctly?

I know this probably is very basic to you Roger, but tis not to me, how exactly do I find out which is controlling the output or if indeed I have both and which color mode should it be please?