Poor color/B&W printing to Canon 9500 II

[nemophoto]

I've used a Canon iPF6100 for a number of years now and still love it. My one frustration has been trying to print on the Museo Large Artist cards -- you can't. Because the paper is 11 inches long, but "only" 7.25" wide, you can't make it work. (At least I haven't been able to.)

Several months ago, I bought a Canon 9500 Mark II to solve my occasional smaller print problem. I recently used Lightroom to print some Museo cards and I was unhappy with the output. Using the Museo profile and Lightroom to manage, the color output was downright weak and lacked punch and contrast. The B&W was slightly better, but no where near my results from my iPF6100.

I just printed the same images from Photoshop, same setup, etc., and what a huge difference. The color matched my monitor. The B&W was better, though was reminiscent of the old Epson magenta/B&W cast.

My big question is, why is Lightroom's color output so different from Photoshop? Both are suppose to be managed color workflows, yet the result with the 9500, using the same profile, was very different.

Thanks for the thoughts.

Nemo

[MBehrens]

I use the previous iteration of the 9500 with good results. The classic drab print reason is double profiling. The feature in LR that tripped me up for a while is that print profiles store the driver settings as well as the LR print settings. I would set up my print in LR and save a profile, then go into the printer driver and make the settings to turn off color management there - we want LR doing the color management, not the printer. Make the print and it would be OK. The next print I would select the print profile and my prints would be terrible. Since I had not updated the profile after going to the driver and turning off color mgmt, the LR profile will reset the driver to its original setting - CM on.

Hope this helps.

[terryco]

We have a Canon 9500 II pro have come to the conclusion that the driver is not recognising the Pro-photo RGB color space which is the default when exporting from Lightroom.  Usually we have been printing from Photoshop after exporting from LR, but it could be that images are being sent to the printer from LR with that color space.

Terry

[MBehrens]

...driver is not recognising the Pro-photo RGB color space...
Terry

That may be the case if you are choosing "Managed by Printer" in the Profile: selection in LR. Otherwise when selecting a paper/printer profile in LR, the out put from LR will be converted to the color space determined by the printer profile. It's strongly suggested by the big brains around here that having LR manage the colors for printing and turning off color management in the printer is the preferred method, and proven in many challenges to this process. Keep looking, something is not set correctly, or another color profile in the chain from camera to printer may be corrupted.