Help!.. I'm Having Problems Printing My Photos!

[Rosha]

I have a LEXMARK Z32.
Today I bought a photo cartridge.
I have printed some tests, and I feel frustrated with the result : The pictures are coming out with a little bit too much YELLOW.
I was wondering how to resolve this problem... I don't have experience printing photos before... Can anybody tell me some hints for working around this problem?

Thanks,
Rosha

[IcarusFree]

Rosha this message is based solely on my personal experience, so please take it with a grain of salt....

I have a lexmark also (X73) and I found it to be not good enough for printing my photos. Calibration of the printer was difficult and photos with lot's of black came out withe the black "cracked". I was very dissapointed.

I also was concerned on the high maintenance cost: a new cartridges (especially color) will last about 50 5x7 prints only!. So even if I got the cartridges at low price (SAMs or CostCo), when I added paper and ink I figured each print was about $0.75. This of course, assuming no prints were ruined, which happen more often than I wish.

Tire of that I set a package of 5 tets prints and went to my local SAMs (Fuji frontier), WaltMart (same), Wallgreens (Kodak) and CostCo (Noritsu). I repeated this 4 times.

I found CostCo to be closest to what I had in my monitor. I also found CostCo more reliable over time. One of the pictures was a standard color chart, so I used that one to "calibrate" my monitor to close the small gap. Since then I get my prints at CostCo.

Did I loose some "flexibility"? Yes. Did I gain convenience? Yes... more importanly I now focus on taking the photo and the slight digital background. This decision free my mind (and pocket) from the printing uncertainty.

This is not answering your question, but I think my experience may open new options for you, in case you haven't consider them already. My 2 cents!

[Rosha]

Thanks for writting me IcarusFree.
No, I want to know, what you mean when you say:

"... One of the pictures was a standard color chart, so I used that one to "calibrate" my monitor to close the small gap..."

Can you explain me a little bit more?
How can I "calibrate" my monitor or my printer???

[la-psycho]

personally i go to Kinkos.

i'll be honest and say that it isn't the best place to print anything because of the price, but since i usually only print...say 20ishx16ish posters, kinkos seems to be the place to go to....but a poster is about 30 bucks a pop. of course it depends on the printing quality, lamination or not, size...etc....(30 bucks is on the high quality side) another reason why i go to kinkos is because it's about a 5 minutes bikeride from my house. :-/

i've never gotten any 5x7 prints or 8x11 prints at kinkos though, but i imagine that it wouldn't be cheap either, but i think i can say that it would be good quality

[verbatm_et]

Printing out a color chart is an interesting way to solve the problem, but there are more standard methods already widely distributed.

Do you have Photoshop?
There is a utility called "Adobe Gamma" which allows you to calibrate your monitor visually. As far as monitor calibrations go, this isn't the best way (machine calibrations are far better, but cost thousands)

Try to find the ICC profile for your monitor. When you download it, right click on it (assuming you're using windows) and click "Install".
This will tell Windows how your monitor displays color.

After that, get the ICC profile for the Costco you go to at www.drycreekphoto.com and plug it into photoshop. This will enable you to more closely match the colors that you get back. Remember that glossy and lustre paper have different color properties, which is why there are two ICC profiles.

Many free software packages use ICC profiles. For example, the DiMage viewer software which comes with all Minolta cameras allows you to match the colorspace of the camera to another colorspace. This is helpful to match what color your camera sees against what is going to print out.

You also want to let the Costco people know to turn off "auto correction", which will end up changing your colors.

You mentioned that you're losing flexibility by using Costco. Why? You can do any changes to your prints and have them printed out exactly as they appear on your screen (if calibrated). Sounds pretty flexible to me.

[jimc76]

It's not true that monitor and printer calibration devices necessarily cost thousands (though you can spend that if you wish). Colorvision has several in the $150 to $400 range. Check their website.
Jim