Color management issue

Getting the right colors all the way from capturing an image to printing is supposed to be easy, isn't it? You'd thing that, with all the technology that goes into it, they would have figured it all out. I'm still amazed (not to say chocked) at how complex it is to make sure that what you see on your screen is exactly what gets produced by your printer.

Anyway ... I have the issue that a lot of poeple have : I simply want my print-outs to look like what I see on my screen ... And it does not really.

- I use a Canon EOS 400D and always shoot in RAW
- I use two monitors : an HP LP2065 and the LCD from my laptop (an HP tc4400), both of them calibrated with a Color Vision Spyder 2 Express (which does not support dual monitors, so everytime I switch monitor I have to go in the Windows desktop properties and manualy switch to the correct profile before rebooting ...)
- I'm using Adobe Lightroom for most of the converting/managing/editing/printing. When I'm printing from Lightroom, I'm using a 300 dpi print resolution, high print sharpening and the HP provided profile for the specific paper. I still need to figure out a real difference (one that my eyes can see) between the LR parameters "relative" or "perceptual" rendering intent.
- I'm printing on an HP B9180 on HP Advanced Glossy photo paper. In the printer driver, I always watch out to swith to "Application Managed Colors" in order not to have double color management performed.

Despite all precautions ... I'm still not happy with the results. So here's what I started doing to try and solve it.

1. Monitors' calibration

I recalibrated both my monitors. I took pictures of them before and after while paying attention not to be in Auto White Balance mode (which would ruin any future comparison). And the before/after pictures comparison tells me that this was not the issue. My eyes cant' see any difference really. So my monitors were probably quite well calibrated to start with.

2. Check colors of the monitors' environment

In the process, I discovered something interesting. When holding a picture close to the screen to compare colors, I realized that if I move the picture a few centimeters in some particular direction, it does look significantly different from a color point of view. Mmm, ... interesting. I had read stuff about how color temperature can be influenced by the environment but never realized how much. It gave me the idea to run a quick test : I covered a big part of my wood imitation desk (which is of yellow/brownish color) with white sheets of papers and took the same comparison shots as when comparing monitors aftyer and before calibration but this time, the only difference is the desk that the monitor is installed on ... Here they are

Above : with the original desk.

Above : desk covered with white sheets.

Pretty interesting. The small picture to the right of the big one is the B9180 printed one that I sticked on the monitor. As you can see, the difference in between the version with the yellow/brownish desk and with the whited desk is significant. Furthermore, the difference between the screen and the printed version is much smaller in the white desk version.

Based on this I do intend to get a neutral cover on my desk (probably white). Assessing how much of the color issue this will solve is going to be challenging : I can restart the editing process of a few "wrong colors" pictures (which I will do later). Ideally, I should go and edit those pictures and see if I come up with different colors when I do this with the white desk. The issue here is that I already know how to fix those issues for those specific pictures and it is going to be pretty difficult not to be influenced by what I already know. I'll try anyway.

3. Check and recalibrate the B9180 printer

I had done this a few days ago without big success (i.e. the printed color were still exactly the same as before doing the calibration) but this time I will follow HP's step by step instructions found here.

3.1. Printer test page : (1) color blocks are OK, (2) none is missing, (3) none is streaked, (4) the status of each of the 4 print heads is "Good".

3.2. Aligning print heads : well, ... the instructions on the web page here says you should be loading plain paper but ... the printer LCD asks for HP advanced Glossy Paper and so does the printer manual!!! So I went for the Advanced Glossy paper. The printer then uses 3 of those sheets to do the alignment. It then gets back to "Ready" status which I suspect means everything went fine. I'm a little worried when I see the 3 printed sheets though : on the first one there are 8 color blocks that are looking perfect, while the same 8 color blocks on the last sheet have some lighter stripes in them. So instead of jumping directly to the calibration step. I'll do a pause here and print a test photo to check if anything has improved.

I was well inspired to pause after step 3. It seem to have done the job. The colors are now much closer to what I see on the screen. I would never have tought that the print head alignment would have solved the color issue. I would have gone to printer calibration first ...

3.3. Calibrate the printer : HP's web instructions says you should first "reset calibration" using the printer's menu. Not sure why ... the manual does not mention this. I thought that this could notarm and so I first reset the caliration before running a new closed-loop calibration. No major improvement here (but again those were achieved in the previous step) but a very subtle improvement.

Here are the scanned versions of the printed photo at each stage (not ideal for you to assess color acuracy but enough to assess how big the change was at each stage) :

Original photo with color problem

Same photo after aligning the print heads : what a difference !

Same as just above but this time setting the printer color space to AdobeRGB i.o. Application Managed Colors (and, of course, setting the application driver on "colors managed by printer" to avoid double color management. No big difference with previous one. The only thing I noticed is the orange bag is a bit more vivid in the picture above.

After print heads alignment AND calibration. Calibration in this case only improved things marginally.

CONCLUSIONS

The environment that your monitor is installed in has got a bigger influence than one might thing. Ensure as much as possible that your monitor is surrounded by neutral colors.

Calibrating the B9180 is not sufficient to solve color issues. One also need to align the print heads (which is counter-intuitive, as one migh thing that aligning the print heads would only solve potential issue of banding/streaks).