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Problems; Color Munki / Canon DPP / Canon 9500 printer

Been suffering a bit this weekend. I just took delivery of a Dell U2711 which seems an excellent monitor for the price - apart from the hardware fault of the flickering right hand side but Dell are shipping a replacement - and so I decided to get back to converting and printing, especially as a friends birthday present was supposed to be prints of a previous birthday party (from 3 years ago, cough).

So, the general equipment list is this:

Canon 1DsIII
Windows 7 64-bit
Canon DPP 3.9.2
Canon Easy Photoprint Pro (latest)
Dell U2711
Canon 9550 (Original)
Ilford Smooth Multiuse or Fine Art papers
Color Munki Photo

To start from scratch I did this:

1. I have set the monitor to AdobeRGB and created a profile for it.
2. I printed test charts on both papers and created ICCv2 profiles (v4 do not work with Canon's Photoprint Pro tool)
3. I carefully adjusted a couple of sample shots (both heavy on caucasian skin tones) and tried to print them on both Ilford papers.

DPP has default workspace set to AdobeRGB and I have checked that the images I am using as samples do not have overrides - they are both set to AdobeRGB too.

I am using Photoprint Pro because other methods have been just as unsuccessful and Canon claim this prints with a direct path to the printer, by passing Windows driver stacks etc. They also claim in their literature a direct CR2 -> print conversion path, so no trouble with 16 bit TIFFs and colorspace headaches from the past.

Results: Blerch. Skintones are greenish and look like the subjects are ill.

The printer is OK, done all the nozzle checks and cleaning and all is working.

I am thinking "paper" now and looking to see how much Canon paper I might have left over that is classed as compatible with a pigment printer. I am also considering going back to an sRGB workflow which seemed to work far better for me. Breezebrowser and default printing seemed to work once. I was trying to take advantage of 16-bit printing and a hoped for improvment in tonal graduations etc.

Anyone got any more ideas for now ?
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Peter,

Have you tried to print from Photoshop or Lightroom? Do you know that the software is using your custom profile?

Have you noticed the PatternrPrint Feature? Read this from a recent dpreview discussion:

tcubed in dpreview.com said:
Canon's Easy-Photoprint Pro has a handy Pattern Print feature, whereby the hues and brightness/contrast are varied over many thumbnail images on one sheet. The idea is to eyeball in the last smidgin of color variation in a given ink & paper combination. I was wondering: if you get your ColorMunki-derived profiles active in EPPP, are they dead-on? Or can you gain some extra value by doing a couple of Pattern Prints?
My own experience with a PIXMA Pro9000, and using the paper manufacturer's profiles is that Canon's, Moab's, and Red River's are very good, calling for maybe a touch of cyan added and a slice of yellow removed. But it is a very close call. Source.

Asher
 
I did two things since posting; I updated the Canon printer drivers and the PPP software. I then set the "Colour Matching" to ICM / Auto and used the Matt Paper setting. Pretty perfect to my initial viewing. Set it back to use the Color Munki generated profile and idenitcally "blergh" results.

X-Rite seem to make it very hard to report a problem or ask a question, so I will try harder - but for now I hold Canon software and hardware mostly blameless.
 
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