Hi,
New to GIMP. I previously printed with Photoshop CS6 from an old hackintosh running High Sierra. I now upgraded to a Mac Mini M4 running Sequoia. The printer is an old Epson Stylus Pro 3800. Epson has a printer driver for a newer printer model that runs on the M4 and that is compatibel with my printer.
I don’t want any Adobe subscription, I am not a pro and just do photo editing and printing occasionally now. So I try GIMP.
I used the exact same photoshop file to print from both computers. The print top left in the attached photo was done via CS6. This print is pretty close to what I see on the screen. The print bottom right was done by inserting the photoshop file in a Pages document on the M4: too dark and saturated, but the colors are still pretty close. Which I think tells me that the Epson printer driver is not the problem. The other 2 prints were done in GIMP. The print interface is very different, the options are shown in a very different way but seem similar to what I get in the Epson interface. I tried two different sets of print settings, but they give the same result: too dark and the colors are completely off.
Hi Jos,
welcome to the forum. Other more knowledgeable people will provide better answers for you than myself. However, I will share my experience and my recommendation for printing. I am a windows user and in the past I found I could not reliably print from Photoshop on my equipment so I abandoned that approach. Instead what I personally use and recommend is the printing software supplied by the printer manufacturer. I have taken this approach with Lexmark, Canon and Epson printers over the years. I edit the image in what ever software I am using and export the edited image as a tiff file. I then use the printing software to print, but my experience has taught me that I need to tweak the color settings to make the final print match the displayed image close enough. I trust the software from the printer’s manufacturer to do this better than a 3rd party application. Other more knowledgeable people may criticize or support my suggestion. I will take on board what they say.
I should also add that these settings usually only need to be changed if you are switching paper types. Also, if I am doing an A3 or A4 print I would normally print a 6x4inch print to check the settings and then if satisfied I would then print the larger A3 or A4
After a lot of experiments, I’ve found that an easy way to coax decent prints out of my old desktop inkjet is to export simple sRGB JPEGs. With those, you can safely leave color management to the printer, and most programs will do a decent job printing accurate colors.
That said, I recently got a much better dedicated photo printer, which comes with Canon’s “Professional Printing” software. This combination, out of the box, was significantly more accurate than my tweaked and optimized recipe for my previous Epson desktop inkjet. I can show comparative examples if you’re interested.
Thanks for the tip. Would that be “Epson Print Layout” in the case of Epson? I can give that a try, but I never had issues printing via photoshop (other than a bit of brightness tweaking), so hopefully someone can tell me what I am doing wrong in GIMP.
Thanks for your reply! I use Adobe RGB out of the camera, and try to keep that throughout the workflow. As I am not a pro, using sRGB probably won’t make much of a difference. But since the printer can handle Adobe RGB (my prints via CS6), and since the pdf print preview from GIMP also looked OK, where is the issue situated then?
