75ZT Community

Help please

I need to sort out my printer so that it prints the same colour red as is on the monitor.

I'm using an Epson R360 Photo ink-jet printer and when printing the standard "Bright Red" it prints out a sort of maroon colour.

No idea how to rectify this

Can anybody assist please?

This is the problem with printers and monitors - they never give you the same results

Does the image or document you are printing have it's own colour profile? If not then if it's possible assign one to it to help the printer translate the colours correctly. If you've already tried this or if this does not work it may be that the bright red is simply out of the printers gamut range.

I've encountered this myself before and through trial-and-error adjustments I discovered that if I over-saturate the colours in the image/document as they appear on screen then the printed results end up more akin to what I was expecting. However, this is not a guaranteed result as some colours (depending on printer, software and so on) do not play well Red is always a difficult colour to reproduce successfully.

It doesn't have its own profile Simon. Well, at least I don't think so.

I changed the printer driver setting to allow the printer control over the colour rather than Windows and it has improved

Yes - I forgot about that setting too! Often helps Good to hear things are better. Maybe playing around with the image saturation (if that's possible in your case) might make things even better?

SpongeBob wrote:Maybe playing around with the image saturation (if that's possible in your case) might make things even better?

Is that possible in CorelDraw?

I couldn't tell you specifically about CorelDraw but as a generic guide:-

1. Save your document when you're happy with the finished result on your monitor.
2. If multi-layered, merge all layers.
3. Use the saturation/colour adjusting tools to increase the saturation/contrast of the image. (It's best using the saturation tools rather than the contrast during this step. Sometimes called "levels" in some programs).
4. Try a draft test-print to see the results.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you find a happy result. Then print (if needed) a final "best" copy.
6. Either close your image or save over the original or save as another file if you wish to keep the settings. I don't usually save at this point as I'd rather keep the layers separate - I can always go through the steps above if I need to reprint at a later date. The original colours, in my opinion are more important than the over-saturated "pseudo" colours for printing.

Hope that helps

If I remember correctly Corel has printer/monitor/camera profiles on the installation disc. Whether these will match your setup depends on how old each are. CorelDraw is by far the best vector program I've used, so it should be possible to get it right.

SpongeBob wrote:I couldn't tell you specifically about CorelDraw but as a generic guide:-

1. Save your document when you're happy with the finished result on your monitor.
2. If multi-layered, merge all layers.
3. Use the saturation/colour adjusting tools to increase the saturation/contrast of the image. (It's best using the saturation tools rather than the contrast during this step. Sometimes called "levels" in some programs).
4. Try a draft test-print to see the results.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you find a happy result. Then print (if needed) a final "best" copy.
6. Either close your image or save over the original or save as another file if you wish to keep the settings. I don't usually save at this point as I'd rather keep the layers separate - I can always go through the steps above if I need to reprint at a later date. The original colours, in my opinion are more important than the over-saturated "pseudo" colours for printing.

Hope that helps

You can't merge in CorelDraw (there is no need to). Instead of using the standard colours down the right hand side try mixing a different red, it will then be incorrect on the screen but closer in print. Not really much difference to what Simon has suggested but mixing a different red as opposed to altering the contrast. I don't have CD in front of me at the moment, so this is from memory.