Simple answers needed, given
Ok, in keeping in the spirit of the 'entry' level designation of this forum, I'll modify my recommendations to the following:
1) Don't make any adjustments whatsoever to your digital images. In fact, don't look at them on any computer screen, because if it is not calibrated and profiled and the image being viewed in a program that honors the profile (none of the Windows native viewers, do, by the way, like Explorer, etc), then it will never show what you might see in a print, anyway. Pay no attention to sRGB vs AdobeRGB, or any of that alphabet soup.
2) If you are using a Canon camera, then get a Canon printer, and plug the camera directly into the USB port on the printer, and use the PIM (Print Image Matching) or whatever Canon wants to call it these days, to get the printer to print the closest approximation of what it thinks the shooter intended when they snapped the photo. In fact, if your camea sports a 'print' button, you will discover what Canon intended it to be used for. Read your camera and printer manual to see how all this 'plug n play' is designed to work for the casual snapshooter.
If this doesn't produce satisfying results, then you will need to concentrate on getting a better image in the camera in the first place. Try color-balancing using custom white-balance with a WhiBal (
http://www.rawworkflow.com), or playing with the preset color-balance settings in the camera. Any attempt to make corrections on a non-calibrated/profiled/color-managed computer will just frustrate you, as you chase after tweak after tweak, trying to get the printer output to look anything like what you see on the screen.
This may seem harsh (and even sarcastic) to the old guard, here, but as Asher cautioned, for folks that are trying to do entry-level digital work, it is way too complex to introduce all the color-management issues at this stage, no matter how well-meaning that may be.
For folks that are just getting their feet wet in digital, and are coming from a point-and-shoot 35mm film experience, where they shot color negative film (very forgiving in a number of ways) and took it to the local drug-store/photo emporium (where a skilled(?) operator used a fairly sophisticated color- and contrast-correcting machine to save many a poorly-exposed, wacky color-cast print, anything more complex than 'plug the camera into your manufacturer-matched inkjet printer and make 4x6 prints' is just simply too much information.
I realize that a lot of folks that used to snap 35mm negatives are
very disappointed or at least surprised when they find that the prints they get from a typical digital camera are under/overexposed, or have weird color casts, when they typically never saw those kinds of results from their drugstore prints. This is the underbelly of digital photography these days, and why people that were casual film shooters either give up on digital, or just figure that somehow the cameras are defective or deficient. Some of them come to forums like these looking for simple answers, and find out that there are none (besides the simple advice I outlined above). Simple answers (at least for the current state of the art of digital photography) tend not to be satisfying to the more advanced photographers, here, but sometimes we have to just give the simple answer and move on.
