Ok so I recently bought a Epson Artisan 835. I'm very very green when it comes to the art of printing. When I was printing utilizing the printer color settings the prints I got were pretty good, slightly dark, and a bit heavy on cyan and magenta. So I turned it over to photoshop and the colors are a bit better but it is maybe one-two stops darker.
While bumbling around with controls in CS4 I made the huge mistake of setting my printer profile to Adobe RGB. I'm not sure why, cause I thought it'd give me a truer color? By doing 4 prints using that profile, I used up OVER A THIRD of my black ink in the process. I went to Page setup/Advanced/Color management and set it to color controls and tried to fix my brightness problem that way. I brought up the brightness +15 and it actually looked darker? Besides, when I had it to that setting I was in the submenu (Epson Vivid, which means I was back to doing printer settings not Photoshop?)
I can understand that prints may naturally be a bit darker on paper than on screen, but that doesn't explain why it looks so different (and frankly, better) when I let the printer control the print settings compared to letting PS CS4 do it. I know I could brighten it up in PS a million different ways, but really, I'd rather want to know why it looks so dark to begin with so that I don't have to lose detail by making unnecessary compensations in the photo.
If I need to start all over again and read some really in depth tutorial on every aspect of printing in PS I'd be willing to do more homework. Someone point me the right way. |
