You will need to find if your printers have advanced calibration controls (not just alignment and basic balance). Sometimes they are accessible only by an obscure service menu that you will have to dig for.

Using the UI controls only, a quick way is to force print a grayscale in RGB mode. You should be able to match 5% and 95% to true gray, and see how close you can get the midtones. Here is a printer calibration stepwedge I created in PS almost a decade ago. I converted it to RGB for you. AFAIK, it's still in gamma 1.0.

many thanks to both of you....

i'd heard about giclee, but had totally forgotten about it - i shall certainly start looking into it, so thanks for the link - though with the cheapest printer being 5k, i think it's probably out of my budget (though perhaps not my wife's!).

ah mv, thank you yet again for coming to my rescue - i'm away for the next few days, but when i get back i'll have a run through with your greyscale. i'm really well and truly out of my depth in this area (closest i ever came was many years ago trying to match company logo colours on tv graphics and getting shit when they didn't match on THEIR UNcalibrated consumer boardroom tv's!)

hanna (my wife) just walked in and saw your greyscale and asked whether it will cure the colour casts she's complaining about? apparently our printers do fine with brightness / contrast, but fail miserably with hue / saturation....

if you're really interested her work can be seen here:

http://www.hannakay.com/artwork.html

the pics don't really don't do justice either to her use of colour, but enough so you can see the headaches they cause....

Leslie,
these are the guys you probably need to talk to down here: www.ausmedia.com.au

They offer various levels (and expense) of printer and scanner calibration.

Bob.

For years I've been using monitor and printer calibration products from Datacolor. If your stuff isn't calibrated, then all bets are off.

http://spyder.datacolor.com/products.php

I use the Epson R-1800 with same Adobe Elements in two separate computers with premium paper. One computer works well with the "R-1800" selected (selected in Adobe Elements) and bombs out with the "Adobe default" selection. The other works well with the "Adobe default " selection and bombs out with the "R-1800" selection. These settings are used with the Epson menu at default.Trying to say that lots of things affect output. The R-1800 menu has many adjustments which require using a lot of paper and time and ink. The nozzles must test perfect also sometimes requiring 4 cleanout operations. If your not using premium paper your wasting your time.
JJK

One of the limitations of scanner / display / printer calibration is it does not help you with out of gamut colors. Simply because what you see on the screen matches the film and then that matches what's printed does not mean when you hold the print up against the original painting the colors will match.


Bob.

One of the limitations of scanner / display / printer calibration is it does not help you with out of gamut colors. Simply because what you see on the screen matches the film and then that matches what's printed does not mean when you hold the print up against the original painting the colors will match.

Not fully understanding that .. I will say that you only asked about calibrating your printer .. you also need to calibrate your computer monitor .. and then color correct your image *before* you try to print it. Don't assume that a photo (or scan) of a piece of artwork will always be the "correct" color in the original file.

Note team that this is my area of expertise having spent many years designing inkjet printers for a large company you've all heard of.

You need a printer that supports ICC profiles if you really want to control color. Most recently manufactured "photo" printers can do this now. You want to have Windows 7 as XP didn't always work.

Some printers will install ICC profiles for themselves when you install the driver. See if the manufacturer has ICC profiles downloadable from their website. If they do then you know they really intend that device to have color managed workflow. Even if they don't they may install them with the driver. I use an hp B9180 which not only has factory ICC profiles but you can download a number of others for 3rd party media.

Giclee printers are just high end inkjet printers with a marketable name and profiles for expensive media.

Newer photo printers will have anywhere from 6 to 12 inks. More inks = smoother area fills (less grain and contouring) and wider gamut (which you may not be able to use if you have a color managed workflow - see below). More inks also means more money when you need to fill it up. Use OEM inks if you really care about your output - this topic needs a whole post itself as many people out there will take issue with it. There are many good reasons to use OEM ink. I do and I am not employed by a printer manufacturer anymore.

Now you need an ICC profile for your monitor. I use a Spyder 3 which is one of the most affordable solutions. There are other tools you can get to profile your scanner and printer yourself but then it starts to add up money wise. The advantage there is that your specific printer is profiled on your specific media.

You need profile everything every week if you really want to have control. Some people do it every day.

What you need to do is figure out how to set the printer driver and monitor to use the ICC profiles in windows. Win 7 has the color management applet in control panel.

If you go the color managed workflow using ICC profiles for everything you have some choices to make in how you control color. This is in how it is mapped from different gamuts/color spaces on your devices. The short answer do you want absolute color control or do you want some kind of perceptual mapping that tries to maintain relationships but not absolute colors?

Absolute you say? Then you will be mostly disappointed as this will cause your system to restrict colors to only those that all of your devices have in gamut. That is, the least common denominator so to speak of all of the colors available across your devices. You will only use a portion of the available color gamut on your printer and will likely see contouring.

So if you want to use all of the gamut your 12 ink printer has then you will need to allow perceptual mapping. Now you don't have absolute control anymore and windows/photoshop are making some mapping decisions. You will see in the photoshop controls 4 choices for how color is mapped - one is the absolute and one is perceptual and there are 2 others. You also need to pick a color space to work in in photoshop - there are many with different tradeoffs - I'd use Adobe RGB to begin with. You will now still have to experiment to get you output to look the way you want because you are not using absolute mapping.

As you can see this is a complicated subject and there are lots of things to learn.

Now forget all of this and tell everything to use sRGB instead. This is the real sRGB not the way that term is used in this forum. sRGB is a standard color space that the big printer and monitor mfgs and Microsoft created to try to bring some color standardization to the PC space. It is not "studio RGB" as used in other places in this forum.

If you tell windows and photoshop (and work in sRGB in photoshop) that your monitor and printer are sRGB you will get OK color control. What you also will get is to use as much of the gamut as possible with OK control of color and you don't need to profile anything yourself. Use perceptual mapping. You output may or may not be close enough. You will have to experiment to get close to what you want.

This book is not bad:

http://www.amazon.com/Real-World-Color-Management-2nd/dp/0321267222/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1279731435&sr=1-1

thanks bastinado,

have actually printed your mail out and handed to wife.

hopefully i'll have a quieter life now ;-)

"hopefully i'll have a quieter life now"

I fear not. I've looked at this a bit further. Now unlike probably most here I have seen the original paintings. I'm pretty confident looking at the CIE 1931 chart that the critical colors that your wife wants you to reproduce are outside the sRGB gamut. The sRGB gamut misses out a large area at the top of the CIE gamut and I'm pretty certain that's where the colors you need to capture and print lie.

No amount of calibration can fix that, the camera cannot record those colors and I doubt any inkjet printer can print them either.

The only way to know for certain is to use a CIE color analyser on the original paintings. The problem is I cannot display the full CIE 1931 chart on my monitors, I can't even find anyone who can sell a chart of all the CIE 1931 colors. You might do better with checking the colors against Pantone swatches.

One thing I can say with a bit more confidence is from looking at those paintings what caught me eye first was some of the colors are not part of the palette one finds in the natural world. There's many colors that painters can use that simply cannot be reproduced by cameras and printing. Reproducing paintings with absolute accuracy is made even more impossible by surface texture.


Now one way you could solve your problem is to buy your good wife three large tubes of paint. One each of sRGB primary red, green and blue. Confiscate all her other tubes of paint.


Now if you do intend to print out my post and show the wife I'd suggest deleting that above paragraph :)

Bob.

When I worked at XXX_XXX_XXXXX we would use an injection molded color chip to check the color of the batches against several acceptable color variational chips in the standards book. Because of the luminence of the product there was no way to machine check the color so it was all by eyeball. The color control was very tight done with flourescent and incandesent lights. And if you had glasses they had to be color corrected.
JJK

Farss, good idea except the paints should be magenta, cyan, and yellow. Add a tube of black for better blacks than you can get with composite black.

I didn't look at the paintings themselves but you are right you can easily create a painting that can't be reproduced on monitor or printer. A 12 ink printer has a wider gamut than sRGB by far but it is trial and error to use it since you can't see it on screen. That is where perceptual mapping can help to use it. The places it is wider depends on the inks chosen.

An 8 ink printer will typically have light magenta, light cyan, and "light black" aka gray, maybe a couple of gray inks. The LM and LC get you smoother color fills in light areas and the light black etc. get you better gradation on B&W prints.

In a 12 ink machine you may get orange, blue, red, violet inks which are all to push the gamut out wider in those areas. Depends on the manufacturer and where they want to push their gamut.

In some devices one of the inks is clear which acts as the second tube of epoxy glue and fixes the inks for better fastness. Fastness may be one or more of: water, light, wet smear, dry smear, highlighter smear, paper curl, surface gloss uniformity; collectively known as "page attributes".

"Color-Lok" paper has the clear fixing agent included in the paper. I don't think it is included in art media (canvas etc) though - mostly just plain paper and some photo media.

Rocky

"Farss, good idea except the paints should be magenta, cyan, and yellow. Add a tube of black for better blacks than you can get with composite black."

The reason I chose the sRGB primaries rather than CYMK was so at least the camera had a chance to accurately capture the painting. My understanding is that sRGB can be fairly well mapped into CYMK.

That said for absolute color matching the printing industry can and does use more than CYMK inks. I've kicked around the edges of the printing industry and witnessed the dramas involved in printing high end fashion magazines with the agency people standing at the end of the press with fabric swatches and jewelry. The way the printers can give them the absolute colors they demand is to load different inks into the press.


Bob.