Printing has always been a pain for me. I did make some progress after watching "From Camera to Print" but I am still finding myself in hopeless situations with some pictures. Yesterday I shot a picture of my daughter in front of her piano (Canon 5D MK II, 28-70L, RAW, 1000 W softbox), imported the pic in Lightroom, bumped the exposure by 0.67, sharpened a tiny bit and exported a full TIFF for printing from Photoshop CS 3 to an Epson R2400. I set my soft proofing settings to Archival Matte and checked "Gamut Warning". The picture looks OK when shown on my calibrated (Spyder 3) 30" Samsung monitor but I was a bit surprised to see about 20% of it out of gamut. I followed several different tutorials on how to address the issue but can't come up with a fix that doesn't completely trash the original picture.
I wonder if I did something wrong or if there are intrinsically hopeless pictures in terms of gamut? Should I shoot with specific parameters if I am targeting a specific printer?
I ended up printing the file with Photoshop color management disabled and let the printer to the job with the ICM profile for Archival Matte. Had to tweak a bit and started with a slightly over satured file in Photoshop to get the look I wanted.