one print good, next one muddy

[Florentine]

I have a HP B9180 Photo Printer w/intel IMac, photoshop CS3.

I'm having great inconsistency in print quality. Was printing Hanamuele: did a  test on 8.5x11, got it just right, jumped to 13x19 and the print went totally muddy.

Printed on 8.5x11 glossy...very nice.
Just printed  glossy on different pic and it's totally muddy again like the Hanamueule.

any thoughts?

[DarkPenguin]

No idea.  Would probably need to know how you are going about printing.  Have you tried the "From Camera to Print" tutorial for sale on this site?  It is about a million hours (6 hours maybe?) of two near retirees (edit: Kinder than "old men", right?) discussing everything leading you through conversion to print.  It is worthwhile.

[DarkPenguin]

On thing to keep in mind with the B9180 (at least with the Windows version of the driver.  I don't know about the mac.) is that it likes to reset settings when you change other settings.

So you can set "application manages color" only to have it change back to "printer manages color" when you change something else.  (Like paper type.)  It can be frustrating.

[Mussi_Spectraflow]

No idea.  Would probably need to know how you are going about printing.  Have you tried the "From Camera to Print" tutorial for sale on this site?  It is about a million hours (6 hours maybe?) of two near retirees (edit: Kinder than "old men", right?) discussing everything leading you through conversion to print.  It is worthwhile.
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Well the short answer is something changed. It's unlikely that the printer went down the tube in a matter of minutes...so the blunt answer is that you most likely missed something in the settings window. The two images could have been tagged with different profiles. Like DarkPenguin mentioned settings often revert between prints, this may be the problem. Double check the embedded profile, BPC, Photoshop/driver color management policies, paper type. I'm sure you find the solution

[Ronny Nilsen]

On thing to keep in mind with the B9180 (at least with the Windows version of the driver.  I don't know about the mac.) is that it likes to reset settings when you change other settings.

So you can set "application manages color" only to have it change back to "printer manages color" when you change something else.  (Like paper type.)  It can be frustrating.
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This matches my experience also. Very frustrating, you can never trust that what you set in the driver is what you get! This makes it impossible to use the printer unattended by sending several images to the printer and letting go at it.    

My solution is to pause the printer spooler and check the settings on every document in the queue before letting the spooler send it to the printer. Very frustrating and the waste of ink and paper this has cost me makes the ink swapping of the Epsons look like a free ticket to the amusement park in comparison.  

It's worth noting that what you see in the driver dialog can not be trusted! You have to set everything every time to be sure. Just because a field shows the right value does not mean that that will be used!

Ronny

[Conner999]

Mirrors my experience with other HP printers. Next one is an Epson.

[neil snape]

Mirrors my experience with other HP printers. Next one is an Epson.
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Is that so you can mirror your experiences with Epson and their recent problems in CS3, LightRoom and almost every other printing application due to preservation of legacy printing hacks that were necessary due to the operating systems and changes in Adobe printing architecture?

You can use driver media presets that work fine. If you change the media (and or preset) after the printing application sends the job file to the driver, it can certainly change the other associated driver settings. In the case of the 9180 the driver actually picks up Photoshop settings for whether or not application color (Photoshop manages Color) or Printer Manages Color) which Epson drivers do not beforehand.

I would have liked the driver to default to application color if any changes are made. It doesn't .

The driver doesn't change anything behind your back, so it's just a question of knowing what you choose before sending the file, and that if you change the print parameters that you need to check all boxes before spooling.

[Ronny Nilsen]

The driver doesn't change anything behind your back, so it's just a question of knowing what you choose before sending the file, and that if you change the print parameters that you need to check all boxes before spooling.
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But it does change things behind my back! Or rather it does not set what the
dialogs says. If I have printed on a custom paper and then want to make another
print without doing anything other than just go the print dialog again, and select
"preferences" to check that everything is OK, the driver will usually show the last
values. I click OK. If I then select preferences again (not doing anything else) I
will see the real values set: usually that HP glossy paper is selected, which is bad
for me as I usually use matte  papers.

You can not trust the values you see in the driver, you have to set all values every
time to be sure, even the values that is what you want!

I guess that if I had used the default papers and profiles this would not have been
such a problem, but I use my own profiles and want application managed color, and
that is a real pain with this printer. But when it gets it right the prints are really good
thou.

My solution is to pause the printer spooler and check the settings on every
document in the queue before letting the spooler send it to the printer. Very
frustrating.

Nice printer, but crappy driver on Windows XP.