Colours very wrong when printed

[Jonny Spaceman]

I have a Xerox VersaLink C600, newish and full of toner.

Printing with colour management document and printer both on sRGB IEC61966-2.1
Printed images are awful, dark, drab and very red, nothing like my photos are showing on Affinity Photo

I know printing stuff is a big tricky and it's not a fault with the software and I haven't read up on Affinity or done any tutorials, but I though I'd throw the question out there in case I am doing something stupid and there's a quick fix or someone has had the same problem and solved it.

So, just added this bit,

if I print a JPG photo taken on my bottom of the range Samsung mobile by double clicking on a file in windows file manager and clicking on "print" it comes out wonderful, as show below. And if I try and print a photo off my new (too expensive) canon D90 camera using Affinity, my new state of the art photo editing software, the print comes out absolutely dreadful. And if I export a JPG from Affinity and print it directly from windows I just get a blank A4 sheet.

Any help out there?

 

Edited December 11, 2021 by Jonny Spaceman
Added a comparison print from windows photo

[NotMyFault]

4 hours ago, Jonny Spaceman said:

And if I export a JPG from Affinity and print it directly from windows I just get a blank A4 sheet.

Well, please try to get a correct printout from windows apps before trying printing from Photo. 
Does the driver offer an option to print a test page? 
https://www.colormanagement.org/en/testimages.html

 

[Pauls]

As BofG suggests switch to 'performed by printer' especially if your documents are sRGB

[Pauls]

typically printers default to that workflow and handle it very well

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, BofG said:

Are you aware that Affinity can only handle RGB profiles?

As I understand it, in the Mac versions CMYK is supported, but only for Postscript printers, possibly because on Macs Affinity uses the system level print service & the drivers for them.

But I could easily be wrong about that, & I have no idea if it applies in any way to the Windows versions.

[Dazmondo77]

18 hours ago, R C-R said:

As I understand it, in the Mac versions CMYK is supported, but only for Postscript printers

Would be great if this were true.

A couple service providers I have use poo poo'd Affinity for the reason " if you can't print out a solid CMYK colour bar it aint pro". I need to print CMYK proofs for clients and my only workable options are making a PDF and printing via Adobe acrobat pro 9 and Adobe Acrobat reader, tried loads of other PDF options, and I hate to say it, but can only currently get accurate output from Adobe (unless some other forum users can advise on further workable options?)- Initially I was shocked to find (after a load of tests) that Affinity only supported RGB - but still hope we get the ability to print accurate proofs direct from Affinity in the future  

[R C-R]

8 hours ago, BofG said:

It's the same on both systems, there have been a few threads in the past of people testing on PostScript printers, the CMYK is never correctly handled.

At least for Macs, wouldn't that depend on the print driver being used?

[Dazmondo77]

22 hours ago, R C-R said:

At least for Macs, wouldn't that depend on the print driver being used?

No - I must have wasted days running CMYK proof targets to fiery rip and my xerox 6180DN via Affinity print system and looks as though it pre-rasterises everything (including all vectors) and converts to RGB then it hits the RIP and is converted back to CMYK and is unable to rasterise the vector information to the printers full capability - resulting in a total botch of a proof - no problem running from InDesign, even going back to Quark 4 and Freehand works as expected - just hope it gets sorted in the future? 

[R C-R]

25 minutes ago, Dazmondo77 said:

No - I must have wasted days running CMYK proof targets to fiery rip and my xerox 6180DN via Affinity print system...

What I mean about 'depending on the print driver' is there is no Affinity print system as such, just the one provided by the macOS. Do you know if there is a print driver installed for your Xerox 6180DN on your Mac? If not, then I don't think Affinity can send CMYK to it.

[Dazmondo77]

12 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Do you know if there is a print driver installed for your Xerox 6180DN on your Mac? If not, then I don't think Affinity can send CMYK to it.

Yes - rock solid running CMYK from other apps that support CMYK

I can still run decent proofs off via Acrobat, but expected (back in 2014)  Affinity Designer (and later Photo and Pub), being marketed as pro graphic design apps to be able to print pure CMYK to a printer via a printer driver that expects CMYK

[Dazmondo77]

Affinitys print dialog is prob my biggest gripe with the suite, as just printing a text document set up CMYK with all text set to solid black, direct from Publisher is a total joke - just ran a page off this morning, as I find it convenient to use a DTP app to print from!?!?!? - looking through a linen tester, it looks like even a page of solid black text that's set from the print dialog to force solid black, first gets rasterised and converted to RGB before it hits the printers RIP, which then, instead of receiving solid black vector information to rasterise at the printers max resolution, the RIP receives an RGB picture which is then converted back to CMYK and then throws away the CMY information resulting in a really poor quality page of text that is made up of an halftone dot instead of nice crisp solid black - totally unacceptable - I've never come across another app that prints this bad - even text edit on the mac can send a page of nice sharp black text to a postscript printer. 

I know the official 'can't be arsed' response is 'make a pdf and print from acrobat'.

[Jonny Spaceman]

Thank s everyone for helping me, I'm super busy at the moment, hopeful I can read through all your advice and figure out what I'm doing wrong over Christmas.