i mostly use paint shop pro 10 (Paint Shop Pro 10 or psp x). i've been using psp since version 4.12 or so, the old shareware version. psp has never had the ability to work in cmyk and still doesnt. you can split rgb images into cmyk and rejoin them into rgb, but there is no working colorspace for cmyk in psp. and since printers seem to want to work in cmyk, i often get some inexact prints from the images i make or tweak. normally, this is not that far off and mostly acceptable for just doing personal work or for friends and family. but being that i want to get a bit more professional on this, i was wondering if someone knows of a way in psp to match colors from the computer to the printer better. yes, i know you photoshop folks can do it and would recommend that i simply get p-shop, but that isnt going to happen for a while. so, thank you.

i also know that photoshop has a gamut checker thing to make sure your printer can handle the colors you want. but again, Paint Shop Pro has no such thing, at least that i'm aware of.

now, a while back, i had a couple of prints that were WAY off, computer to printer and i thought something was wrong with the printer. i'd been having very good results up till then. so i even called HP customer support to see what was wrong. we went through calibration to cleaning print heads, updating printer drivers and even gettting a small patch for the software. this all helped a tiny bit, but didnt really resolve the problem. those few prints just wouldnt really even come close.

since being on retouchpro i've learned about cmyk, printers, color gamuts and so on and i've come to the conclusion that there was nothing really wrong with my printer. at least, that's the conclusion i'm operating on at the moment. and what i believe is going on is that my gamut is off as far as the printer is concerned and that colors are having to be translated into colors the printer can handle. like i say, normally this works just fine with very little variation. it's just a few prints that come out pretty far off. so, the question is, what can i do on the computer side to ensure a really good match up with the printer when using Paint Shop Pro 10 (or 9 or 7. i have both of those as well)? i also have adobe elements 4 (but i'll post about elements in a different thread). do i need to get a profile, change to a profile i already might have, find some feature i dont know about yet or what? surely there are psp users out there doing fairly exact printing from psp. so, what's the secret?

i'm currently using an HP 7660 inkjet printer, 3 cartridges, tricolor, photo (i think) and black.

i can print black and whites just fine. the trouble i have normally is when i print a LOT of near shades and hues of one color in one image. like if i have a blue flower in sunlight and shade that has a lot of different hues and shades of blue in it. some of the blues will come out almost gray or greenish or both, and some the blues will be mostly ok. i dont mind it being a tiny bit off, but in the one type i mention here, these can get pretty badly off.

so any help here would be appreciated.

craig

Hi Craig,

Don't know that I can add anything that can help you, but we'll see.
I have used Paint Shop Pro for a little while, since ver7. I tried X, but had some issues with it and removed it quickly, but that's another issue. :)

I'm guessing you've read most of the corel links (http://support.corel.com/scripts/rightnow.cfg/php.exe/enduser/std_alp.php?p_sid=FX1Tf6-h&p_lva=757404&p_li=&p_page=1&p_prod_lvl1=155&p_prod_lvl2=%7Eany%7E&p_search_text=monitor+calibration&p_new_search=1&p_search_type=3&p_sort_by=dflt) regarding CMYK and related items. If not maybe this will be of some help. I noticed in reading that before printing the CMYK separations, you'll have to configure the CMYK preferences to determine how Paint Shop Pro handles the conversion from RGB to CMYK, and then save these preferences in a profile. (also noticed this - "CMYK preferences editing is intended for experienced graphics artists. Corel Technical Support will be unable to assist you in setting up your CMYK profiles." and since I haven't really done much with CMYK in PSP neither can I! sorry :confused:

I also disabled color management in Paint Shop Pro a while back (by default it's enabled in versX) and haven't had much of a problem at all regarding print issues, also have a HP printer, 7150. I do recall that when it was enabled, I had a few that looked a bit off. Might be worth a look.

Guess this isn't a lot of help, but maybe somebody else has some better answers. :bigthmb:

garazon,

thanks for the help. i've been reading the stuff on the corel site you posted. mostly all it's telling me is that i cant do what i want. i dont want color separations. i want color. this is me printing at home. if i were taking it to a pro printer the separations would be helpful, but i'm not.

i did look more into the profiles. it seems Paint Shop Pro 10 has about a dozen different cmyk profiles that came with it. the one i'm using is a Kodak one. but since i cant get the image into cmyk as a single working colorspace, this doesnt really help much either. what i really need is something to see on the monitor what's going to be printed on the printer, something that will only show me the colors that the printer will print.

i suppose i could compose a palette for Paint Shop Pro that would only display the proper cmyk gamut colors, but that sounds like a lot of work and i'm not even sure what those colors are.

now, there are some more color profiles that came with Paint Shop Pro 10, but i dont see anything that says anything like 'cmyk only' and i'm just not familiar enough with any of them to tell what might be what.

this is one of the reasons i hate software and 'tech help'; the helps always seem to be written by someone that already knows the stuff and expects that you do too... quite odd.

at any rate, garazon, i do appreciate you posting. if nothing else it helped me confirm some 'nope, this dont work' items :) if you know what any of those profiles do, let me know.

craig