Print quality less than Display

[Robert Rainey]

Scanned watercolor painting with an Epson V600 Scanner at 400DPI into Affinity Phot v2. When printing to new Epson PureColor 900 Printer, the quality is less than displayed on MAC with Ventura OS. I have assigned Color Profile sRGB IEC610996-2.1 to LG Monitor and in AP Preferences>Color. I am admittedly a newbie and ultimately want to print greeting cards. Any guidance would be appreciated.

[nickbatz]

There are a lot of potential causes for lousy prints, and you're talking about color spaces rather than resolution. Is the color the problem?

One issue could be that you're using the Mac system print driver, which is at best just okay. The installation details are going to be different for your Epson printer than for a Canon one, but you need to select the right ICC profile for the printer and paper you're using to get the right colors.

That's in any case, whether you use the Mac driver or not. And that leads to the next suggestion: download a trial of Binarten Qimage One and see whether that improves the quality.

If the problem is low resolution, probably the first thing to check is the DPI inside Affinity Photo: Document->Resize Document, then set it to 300 DPI. I've been using the Bicubic resampling algorithm.

Just a few things off the top of my head.

 

[debraspicher]

Ideally you would have a calibrator for both display and printer, calibrate both and create profiles, then use print profile in your app to proof results before printing. Usually I just calibrate my display as accurate as possible, send off with whatever profile I was using to create (usually Adobe 1998 for screen works) and let the printer handle the color profiles with their equipment.

[nickbatz]

18 hours ago, debraspicher said:

Ideally you would have a calibrator for both display and printer

I guess, but my garden variety Samsung monitor with the plebeian stock profile and the output of my Canon Pro-1000 (using the ICC profiles for the two different fine art papers I use) are as closely matched as you're going to get.

That could be dumb luck, and I'm certainly not snorting at the concept. But my sense is that in this "why do my prints look lousy" case it would be shooting flies with an anti-aircraft gun.

[nickbatz]

And to put a finer point on it, my sense is that issues like the printer simply not being able to produce a particular color you feed it dwarf monitor calibration. (The Pro-1000 has 11 colors, and it doesn't produce some shades of blue, it turns some maroon shades brown, etc.)

But there's also an angry mob of printing nerds gathered outside my office with pitchforks, so don't take anything I say as gospel. I've only been serious about printing for about a year.

Put another way, I'm confident that Robert's issues are much more fundamental.

[RichardMH]

If your monitor isn't calibrated you'll have problems no matter what else you do. Took me a while to learn that.

One way to help isolate the problem is to print on a department store printer. Doesn't cost much and can help sort out whether the problem is with your monitor settings or your printer settings. 

[nickbatz]

Well, I can only repeat what I posted already.

Nothing wrong with monitor calibration, but that's talking about what accent color to paint a dining room wall in a house that has no plaster on the walls.

[DenjiSpeosa]

It sounds like you're running into some issues when trying to print your scanned watercolor painting on your new Epson PureColor 900 printer. It could be that the settings on the printer or in Affinity Photo are not properly configured for your specific paper and ink combination. You can try to adjust the printer settings like color profile or resolution in the printer driver.

[DenjiSpeosa]

On 1/17/2023 at 10:42 PM, DenjiSpeosa said:

It sounds like you're running into some issues when trying to print your scanned watercolor painting on your new Epson PureColor 900 printer. It could be that the settings on the printer or in Affinity Photo are not properly configured for your specific paper and ink combination. You can try to adjust the printer settings like color profile or resolution in the printer driver.

Also, you can try to calibrate your monitor, to match the color of your printouts. Websites like https://crearty.io allow to create own cards and to get the best print quality when printing greeting cards. Also, keep in mind that the printing process can be a bit tricky, and it may take some experimentation to get the desired results.

[NotMyFault]

On 12/28/2022 at 6:46 AM, RichardMH said:

If your monitor isn't calibrated you'll have problems no matter what else you do. Took me a while to learn that.

One way to help isolate the problem is to print on a department store printer. Doesn't cost much and can help sort out whether the problem is with your monitor settings or your printer settings. 

I would mildly reject this statement.

You don't need to calibrate every monitor. Most come with usable presets if used in native color mode (sRGB) In most cases simply use the correct settings (picture mode, white point, brightness reduced, sharpness off, saturation to neutral).

i have 5 displays, calibrated them, but differences are really minor, just noticeable in a/b tests.

and if you use a display which is totally off, static calibration may not be enough, because they are unstable and change too fast (temperature effects)

 

For professional usage where you have measurable KPI like delta E below a threshold of course you need calibration.