I am a poor photographer having issues with my current printer, Epson R300.
When I got this printer, straight out of the box I had great results. I would mostly process in Photoshop but print using the ancient Paint Shop Pro 7, because I used it to add borders and I also found the way the image looked in PSP7 was more true to the printer results.
I had very neutral monochromes with and a good range from true black to whites, and very acceptable colour rendition. The irony is I had no idea of colour spaces or printing options, it was all on defaults except I was shooting Adobe RGB on my camera simply because someone advised me it was better for printing while RGB was better for displaying on the web.
Anyway, I had to reinstall windows on my PC and therefore printer drivers, photoshop and PSP7.
Since then my workflow stopped working. Washed out colours as if suddenly the printer was able to reproduce less colours, black was not black just dark grey, and I even get banding appearing randomly which alignment and head cleaning only help marginally.
To try and solve this I started printing from Photoshop as it gave more control, but to be honest I have never managed to get the results I was getting with my previous 'ignorance is bliss' approach.
How would you guys address this? Maybe a newer printer would make things easier for me again? Have drivers/colour management etc got any easier to manage in newer software than Photoshop CS2?
At one point I went back to my Olympus P-440, a dye sublimation A4 printer, but boy was that a bad purchase. It was expensive and its not worth the space it takes. Prints are always visibly softer than the same file printed on inkjet or from a lab and the gamut of colours the printer seems capable of must be by far inferior. I was even getting strange purples appearing in a monochrome prints. Like purple fringing but much more pronounced in light areas of the print.
As you can see I have plenty of printing woes.
Thanks in advance for any feedback