I bought Hidden Power 2 recently and love, love, love it!

OK, I have a question though that may or may not be solvable here. I noticed that what came out of my printer (HP 952C) didn't look like what non-color-corrected mpix gave me (which looks much more like what I see on-screen). I ran CMYK.pdf through like the book suggests and the rich blacks came out like they were supposed to-- BUT the "grey" boxes on the left hand side had a distinct magenta cast to them. On thinking about it I realized that I've consistently been seeing such a cast.

I don't notice this problem at all when I'm printing pics like family portraits or color landscapes, but it becomes *very* noticeable when I am trying to do something like tint a B&W photograph to a particular shade.

I've tried a little bit playing with the printer driver options-- turned off Image Color Management but that made no difference; tried hitting the "cooler" option but that just added a blue cast and didn't get rid of the magenta cast.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

Not totally certain what you mean, but if you watch Swampy's small tute on it, it may explain some of it.

http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=270

Cahn,

Separating into CMYK is only necessary in certain situations, and really those situations are not usually viable now in the more standard home RGB workflow. In other words, even in the past few years how we work with images has changed. Don't bother with the CMYK conversion unless you specifically need it for a process.

Color management has also changed and I've re-written the book a few times...More than just that has changed!

Also...if you are printing B&W, you may want to try printing with just black ink. There are many other problems that can occur to throw off one of the inks depending on how you handle the output.

Glad you like the book ;-)

Thanks for the responses!

Peter S, I watched the tutorial and it was very interesting, so thanks! It may be at least partially applicable to my problem, though I'm more wondering why I'm getting different results from my printer than both my screen and a professional printing service, both of whom agree.

Richard_Lynch, I wasn't doing the CMYK separation for my prints from photos, just for your .pdf that came with the book. However the magenta cast was present there too, which was interesting to me because it seemed to prove (I think?) that it really is a problem with the magenta in my printer and not with (e.g.) my screen calibration.

It sounds from both your responses though that it would help if I looked at more recent articles on color mangement than HPPE2 (I;m still living in the dark ages with Elements 2.0, so that's the book I bought)-- thanks again!

Going cooler in your print management won't help much with a magenta cast (it is more for correcting orange tones). If the magenta cast is fairly even, you could try correcting it by applying a green photo filter or adjusting the magenta-green curve (curves adjustment if you are working in cmyk mode) in photoshop and see if that balances out your print.

Cahn,

I re-read everything and think I have a better idea of what you are saying now. You should not be getting a cast in the CMYK.PDF output where you seem to be. And as you say if it is showing up in black-and-white prints, that is an issue.

My guess is that the issue is the paper you are using and the settings used for the output--assuming the printer software has some bells and whistles. That is, i have a simple HP printer that I let the kids use and when it prints on plain paper, you very well better choose 'plain paper' as the target, or you won't get a decent print. The printer adjusts to the paper based on the setting and how the selected paper type absorbs ink.

I would not get into the habit of customizing your output, as it may lead you to tweaking constantly rather than solving the root problem.

So check the printer manual before you do any other adjustments...OK?

ah, thanks! I've been out of town so have not had a chance to try out things but that sounds *very* plausible. Thanks again!