[stevebrot]

Hi,
I recently retired my Canon i860 and took delivery of a new Canon Pixma iP4820. It is nice and shiny and quiet, but has been giving me fits with a magenta cast on low saturation images. I do a lot of 16-bit scans from monochrome negatives to which I then add selenium tint emulation in Lightroom (v1) and print out using printer controlled color from LR and ICM on the printer.

Regardless of what combination of color management features applied, I have been getting a very strong magenta cast. The only way to get a halfway neutral tone is to dial down the magenta -20 or more. That just doesn't sound right.

Does anybody own this printer and have any hints?


Steve

[cats_five]

Are you using Canon inks and paper? Are you using the right paper profile? Is there a leaflet in the paper box giving details of what settings to use to print to it from your printer, or a similar one?

[stevebrot]

The printer is brand new (Canon ink, duh...) and the paper is Canon Photo Paper Plus Glossy II. I have been through the manual and tried all the settings and paper profiles (both printer side and computer side) to no avail. This issue really puzzles me since my i860 NEVER required any fussing.


Steve

[cats_five]

Have you tried contacting Canon, since it's all brand new?

[artobest]

Magenta casts can be caused by double-profiling. Have you tried switching off the printer's colour management altogether and doing the CM from within LR? You would need to select the profile for the paper you're using - Canon paper profiles have odd abbreviations, which you can find explained here and there online. Also, you can try different rendering intents (either Perceptual or Relative Colorimetric), and make sure that all the Canon driver's little 'helpers' are switched off, too.

BTW, are your images tagged? If not, assign a colour space so the CM system knows exactly what it's converting. And check the prints under different lighting conditions - you may be experiencing metameric failure.

[stevebrot]

Magenta casts can be caused by double-profiling. Have you tried switching off the printer's colour management altogether and doing the CM from within LR? You would need to select the profile for the paper you're using - Canon paper profiles have odd abbreviations, which you can find explained here and there online. Also, you can try different rendering intents (either Perceptual or Relative Colorimetric), and make sure that all the Canon driver's little 'helpers' are switched off, too.

BTW, are your images tagged? If not, assign a colour space so the CM system knows exactly what it's converting. And check the prints under different lighting conditions - you may be experiencing metameric failure.

Thanks for the suggestion. I have tried it with CM managed by LR, CM managed via ICC on the printer, and CM turned off both in LR and on the printer with almost identical results from all three approaches. (A pox on Canon for making their ICM file names so cryptic ) As for tagging...I generally do my printing directly from LR (Adobe RGB, I would assume) and set the printer to use that as the source color space. I also tried exporting to TIFF and JPEG with both sRGB and Adobe RGB and printing from Elements and Paint Shop Pro. Same results.

...News Flash!!!

Up until a few moments ago, I have been working in the dark, so to speak. It has been evening or early morning with no light other than standard tungsten light bulbs. I just took one of the prints over to the window for a little natural light and presto...the magenta cast is significantly reduced. I wish I could say that all is well, but this is almost worse since it would be nice to have one's prints look good inside under artificial light.


Steve