Printing help

Hi

Iam trying to print A4 prints from my lap top to my HP photosmart 8250. My prints are rather dissapointing ( look flat with no punch) compared to what I have on my screen, I am usng a HP Pavillion zd 8000 lap top so big screen etc.. I am using HP top quality paper and the images ere taken with a Pentax 200D at the best quality and are JPEGS. I am using HP's own editing software. I am told that I need to calibrate my monitor to my printer but this means nothing to me. Can anyonye suggest how to improve the quality of my prints please.

Hi,
First of all we need a few details,
1-O/S system used (XP, Vista etc)
2-Camera Settings.( Adobe RGB, sRGB etc)
3-Printer Settings ( Auto, Manual etc)
Would you also fill in your location details ( could have someone on your doorstep that can help)

Regards.

Windows XP

sRGB
Printer was set on best quality printing


Location Inverness

I have printed out an image I took recently of a snow scene taken in to the light. On my monitor the snow looks a good white but on print it does have a grey/bluish tinge

Thanks

What paper did you use and what inks? My own experience was that until I just used Canon ink and paper with my Canon printer I was struggling to get decent prints. I then read and implemented their advice on printing carefully and while the colours don't fully match the screen they are a fair rendition and for all I know might be more accurate than my monitor.

Mike

HP premium plus and Vivera inks. To me the prints look abou 1.5 stops under exposed compared to waht I se on the screen.

On your printer if you can: adjust the brightness, you should find it under the colour management tab..

Also I am finding when printing to A4 I am loosing parts of the photo that appear on the screen? About and inch all round

Somewhere in the printer settings you should have, Scale to size, or Scale to paper size.

I dont seem to be able to change brightness. But can change Spray & volume but not sure what these would do.

Photo brightness
Once in the Enhance Image menu, the Photo Brightness feature will appear highlighted on the printer screen.
Press the Select Photos button to adjust the photo brightness to your preference.
The brightness setting ranges from - 3 to + 3 . Normal brightness is 0 .
Press the OK button.

The above was taken from the printers review on google of OUR TO Enhance photo printing with a HP Photosmart 8450..
Hope this helps..

There is another conudrum I am trying to get my head round and that is cropping & resising before printing. I take my images at max qulaity and they are areoung 3800 pixels by 2600 pixels and I usualyy crop bits off. Now what I then usually do is perhaps enhance the image and print out to A4 size. However, reading various books on digital it seems to suggest that I should rezize my images before printing to A4. Can anyone tell me why I should need to do this and if so rezize to what dimensions? Also any suggestions on where I can read about the effects of cropping and rezising images as I dont really understand what effect it all has on my images.

Because then you have complete control over the output image.
Within Photoshop, resize to 360DPI and the exact dimensions that you want printed. Then to sharpen, view at 50% (which gives a good approximation of the print), and run unsharp mask - you want the screen result slightly OTT with a little bit of visible halo. That should give a very crisp inkjet output.
(See the sharpening tutorials on www.thelightsrightstudio.com )
HTH!
Matt

Ok. So I am trying to get my head round why I would shoot at the best quality on my camera and then make it smaller to print. Would I not be loosing resolution by resizing? Also when I choose to print A4 using my editing software (HP IMage zone) would it not rezize it automatically? What I could do with is a tutorial on the basics of compression, resolution, dpi etc, cropping and rezizing. Thanks for all the suggestions.

Are you absolutely sure you would never want to print larger than A4? That's why you shoot at the highest resolution and best quality, to give you that option to print as large as you can.

Yes. But it's detail that wouldn't be visible in the print at that size anyway. Resizing allows you to concentrate on, and maximise, the detail that you can see.

Yes. But you wouldn't have control of what it did when resizing (see reply above).

I've used Matt's 'view at 50%' technique and it works beautifully, the prints you get look so crisp and detailed. I've just had some leaflets printed and one of the images used on it is this Autumn Colours pic and it looks stunning. I've also used it to inkjet print a brochure, and again, amazing looking results, so much better than I'd got previously. Looks awful on screen , but in print, fantastic.

Dan

On my editing prgramme when I wish to rezize I get the option of rezizing by number of pixels or a percentage figure and therfore I am unsure how to rezize so it is A4 size and ready to print like suggested above. Neither do I have the option of changing DPI?