Canon PIXMA Pro 9000
How to get the best results from your printer.
Please send corrections and suggestions to david@canonpro9000.com
Sample contents:
The Canon PIXMA Pro 9000 printer is capable of producing stunning prints with glorious detail and vivid colors. Prints that you are happy to display on walls or share with family and friends; prints that affirm your move from photo labs and show your photographic skills in their best light.
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Initial Setup
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If you have an existing stock of photo paper, or were tempted by a cheap (but “High Quality”) ream of paper, I’d suggest holding off on using them until you have some good prints under your belt. ...
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Getting Ready to Print
A number of factors affect the print quality:
· The image being printed
· Paper choice
· Paper size (notably as concerns aspect ratios)
· Inks
· The software (Photoshop, Qimage, PaintShopPro, etc) that is being used to print the photo.
· Printer Configuration
· Printer malfunction (unlikely, but it happens)
· Your monitor (well, not directly, but if you adjust an image to look good on your monitor it doesn’t mean it will look good in print).
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Color Management
Your camera, monitor and printer all have different capabilities when it comes to colors. View the same image on one monitor and then on someone else’s and there’s a good chance it will be different. Perhaps the reds will be slightly brighter or shadow areas darker; and not uncommonly quite drastically different especially when comparing against different monitor qualities, or LCD to CRT. Now throw in that your printer uses different technology to render color (i.e. physical ink as opposed to electrons), that different paper types have different characteristics affecting how a print looks (how glossy it is, weight, ink absorption, etc) and that your camera is another device with yet another set of color characteristics.
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The Image Being Printed
The best printer in the world isn’t going to make a bad image look great on paper. Sorry. It also isn’t going to do anything for the shot that looked great in the camera’s two inch screen but wasn’t so hot when shown on a monitor screen. I’d always recommend getting to a point where you are happy with the image on-screen before trying to print. It seems that many people skip that step and go straight to print. Of course, that brings up issues on the quality of the monitor (see below), but as a rule of thumb it is best to have a good idea of what you would like to see printed before you start the process, otherwise you won’t know when you get it.
Aside from “goodness” issues such as the composition, there are a number of image quality factors to be aware of:
The Image Color profile
If an image isn’t tagged with a color profile, there’s a good chance that the printed colors won’t match what you expect. Extending the language metaphor introduced in the Color Management section, it would be like receiving some text and asked to translate it, without being told it is French. Without the French dictionary, you may come close to a translation, but it won’t be perfect.
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How big can you print?
As noted above, the Canon printer is capable of stunning results, but some reality has to set in before we go too far. Printing a 13x19 photo from a camera-phone image probably isn’t going to look to great. Nor will a shot that looks a little blurry on screen suddenly take on a new crispness just because you pass it to an expensive printer. Of course, you can bend the rules with software (see section below), and some images do better with less detail than others (landscapes or those intentionally fuzzy or grainy for artistic effect), but the generally you need the following image dimensions for printing at the given sizes:
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Aspect Ratio
Most point and shoot cameras have a 4:3 aspect ratio. That is, the ratio of width to height is 4:3 because that was the typical computer and TV aspect ratio when such things were first thought up. It is not a measure of the physical dimensions of the image (ie not 4 inches by 3 inches), but of the height divided into the width, or vice-versa. Unfortunately, it is unusual to print a photo with a 4:3 aspect ratio, as 6x4, 7x5, 10x8, etc . are much more common. Even if you using a Digital SLR which typically creates 6x4 aspect ratio images, you still have a problem when printing 5x7, etc. So what do so? There are three basic choices:
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My favorite of Canon’s photo paper is the “Photo Paper Pro”. I use it for all wall mounted shots, when I want the best quality this printer can give me. Especially when you are using the large 13x19” sheets to create larger prints: the results are outstanding. It is more expensive than the other Canon papers, but well worth it.
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Monitor Color Calibration
In the age of digital photography, most images are post processed in some way through a computer before being printed. Unfortunately, what you see on the screen isn’t necessarily what you will see in the printed output. Indeed, as the underlying display technology is different – electrons to ink drops -- achieving identical results from monitor to printed output is very difficult. Compounding this issue is the fact that monitors do not confirm to an industry standard profile: some will be brighter, display more saturated colors, be set for different ‘warmness’ (color temperature) levels show better detail in the shadows, etc. Add to that the fact that users adjust the brightness, contrast and color levels based on personal preference, viewing conditions, or by accident, then you have a situation where any two monitors are going to display the same image differently.
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