Printing CMYK with Canon pixma ip4000

[liamtoh]

I have a canon pixma ip4000 BJ printer and photo printing is no problem.
But when I want to print CMYK documents from indesign or illustrator the colors dont come out right.
It is impossible to print red, this comes out as brown. Apparently I need to get the right printer profile for printing CMYK docs.

When printing to pdf I use U.S. or Europe Prepress Default (with US webcoated or Euroscale coated) and that works, but I cant use the settings for the Canon because it doesnt support these settings.

Can anyone tell me which settings to use?? I already wasted quite a lot of paper and time trying to find this out...

Thanks!

 

[Grandad35]

Liamtoh,

I didn't know that you could even print a CMYK image on an RGB device. Qimage won't even open CMYK encoded .jpg images. Photoshop opens them but requires you to convert the image to an RGB color space to print it. When I tried the standard Microsoft photo Printing Wizard, I was amazed to find that it both opened and printed the image. I guess that I shouldn't have been surprised, since this package is totally unaware of color management.

Do you have access to a program (like Photoshop) that can convert the color space to aRGB? If you don't but want to do a test, post an image somewhere (http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=36) and I'll convert it and post the results so you can try printing it.

 

[liamtoh]

Granddad35, thanks for your help! I am new to this CMYK/RGB stuff so I am not really sure about this.
I do have access to Photoshop and tried printing an RGB image (red square) as well as a CMYK converted one, both come out brown instead of red.
Im pretty sure its not a problem with the printer because photos come out right (using the standard Canon photo software).

Im working on a brochure using Adobe Indesign and the only mode you can work in is CMYK (I believe this is the format that proffesional printers use) and I am (almost...) sure I should be able to print documents from Indesign (or Illustrator or photoshop).

So, maybe I should ask this:
Is it possible to print CMYK based documents on the Canon ip4000? How? What do I need to do to get the colors the way they should be?

 

[Grandad35]

Liamtoh,

Have you tried using Photoshop to convert the image to aRGB and then "soft proof" it using the Canon printer profile to see what you should expect from the printer? This is a test image (http://www.nifty-stuff.com/img/files/aRGBProfile.jpg) that I converted to Canon's Photo Paper Pro profile, and then back to aRGB (the file was too big to post with Canon's profile attached to it) (http://www.nifty-stuff.com/img/files/PrinterProfile1.jpg). Does this shift in the colors look anything like what you are seeing?

Photos seldom have big areas of saturated colors that push outside of the printer's color gamut, so you don't notice that the colors aren't exactly like what is on your display (assuming that your display and printer have been calibrated). When designing a brochure, it is easy to select colors that are outside of the printer's gamut. Since they are usually large areas of a solid color, any clipping of the gamut will really stand out.

It is certainly possible to print these documents on your printer, but I believe that they will have to be converted to RGB to do it. Here is another thread on this subject that you might want to look at: (http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1003&message=13342811).

The subject of color management isn't an easy one to get your arms around. If you aren't well versed on the subject, you might also want to look at (http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=118), (http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/color_management.htm), (http://www.normankoren.com/color_management.html) as a starting point.

 

[liamtoh]

Thanks Granddad! I will try this.