Printout quality

mgfvvc

My daughter needs to print some pictures showing some fine detail for homework. She has laid out a page in Word containing the various pictures and they have all the required detail on the screen, but when she prints them a lot of detail is lost. They also come up significantly darker.

I have checked the printer settings and the print dialogue suggests that it is being printed at 2400 dpi, which I think should be sufficient to retain the fine detail. The printer itself is a Brother colour laser printer.

I have tried printing from a screenshot as well as directly from Word, but that did not help. What can I do to improve the detail on the printout? Ideally I would not change the layout.

Neil_Jones

First of all, if what you're printing is literally just images/pictures, then Word is not really the right program for this.  Number of times I've seen people try to use Word for things its not really designed for...  Publisher, if available, is better equipped for this sort of project.

The darkness thing is almost always caused by your monitor being too bright.  Remember what you see on screen (particularly on domestic equipment) is not 100% guaranteed what you'll get printed.  So if your screen is too bright what you're doing is effectively looking at an enhanced picture and lighting up the dark areas, but that doesn't change the fact the images are still dark in the first place.

mgfvvc

Neil_Jones said:

First of all, if what you're printing is literally just images/pictures, then Word is not really the right program for this.  Number of times I've seen people try to use Word for things its not really designed for...  Publisher, if available, is better equipped for this sort of project.

Printing the same pictures using Publisher, I get the same results.

Heedtheadvice

Colour laser printers do not normally give good rendition of photographs unlike photo inkjets.

Do however have a look in the printers management app on the computer (I presume there is one!) and see what other adjustments you can make to compensate.

If you are using Word do you have the Office suite installed? If so open Office picture manager if you have that too and you will be able to adjust the pictures for bightness, contrast colour etc and save as copies with another name (such as a simple suffix so as to contain the original name for reference. You can print the photos from that app or, once you are happy with them, replace the ones in the Word document.

There are of course many other picture 'adjusting' programs one that can be downloaded for free is photoscape that is easy to use. You also get some adjustment in to in Word (IIRC!) by right clicking individual images....though my memory cards a little!!!

Also comments as above post by Neil...can you similarly adjust pic in publisher?

Neil_Jones

mgfvvc said:

Neil_Jones said:

First of all, if what you're printing is literally just images/pictures, then Word is not really the right program for this.  Number of times I've seen people try to use Word for things its not really designed for...  Publisher, if available, is better equipped for this sort of project.

Printing the same pictures using Publisher, I get the same results.

Yes but that wasn't the point.  The point was what you see on screen (in any program) isn't a guarantee of what you get.  Turn your screen brightness down if you haven't done so already.

You may need to change the brightness of the pictures in Publisher/Word to offset the dark effect, so if you make it brighter on screen the print should compensate accordingly, but you may need to test this.

I've done a lot of slide conversions for my parents recently, while they look lovely and pretty on screen, they all came out with a blue tinge on their inkjet printer, and it's all because the printer was trying to be clever and "optimise" the colours ("black" on a lot of inkjets tends to be a very dark blue).  Once I'd figured out what the problem was the other resolution was to reduce the amount of blue in the picture, so it looked a bit weird on screen but the print, while still slightly tinged with blue, wasn't as bad as it was.

It may be a similar situation here.

mgfvvc

Publisher seems to have been a red herring and the last version of Office that came with Picture Manager was 2010.

I have played with one of the pictures in Irfanview, which offers a range of colour correction options that I don't really understand. If I had to describe the problem with the printout, I might describe it as oversaturated, so saturation seemed like an option that might be worth playing with. A big reduction in saturation seems to bring the print a lot closer to what I see on the screen, so I might be on the right track?

Neil_Jones

mgfvvc said:

Publisher seems to have been a red herring and the last version of Office that came with Picture Manager was 2010.

I have played with one of the pictures in Irfanview, which offers a range of colour correction options that I don't really understand. If I had to describe the problem with the printout, I might describe it as oversaturated, so saturation seemed like an option that might be worth playing with. A big reduction in saturation seems to bring the print a lot closer to what I see on the screen, so I might be on the right track?

With all due respect, please read the thread again, you've been given a few different options for what to do and you've ignored most of them.

It might be worth uploading some pictures of an image you're trying to print, what you see on your screen and what comes out on the printer so somebody can see exactly what the problem is.

If you have to reduce the saturation of an actual image by a big margin to make the print match what you see on your screen then something is wrong somewhere and it will almost certainly be your screen settings .  Ideally the variation between screen and paper should be slight, tolerable or relatively reasonable, you shouldn't have to make the print fit the screen, you should be making the screen fit the print, because if you do that you can just generally squirt the print out without a need to process the image to any great degree.  Some minor variation on occasion yes, but not to the extent where you have to rip half the saturation out yourself...

mgfvvc

Neil_Jones said:

With all due respect, please read the thread again, you've been given a few different options for what to do and you've ignored most of them.

I've been a bit rushed and haven't really said what else I'd tried.

I had experimented a bit with brightness in publisher and hadn't seem much difference. Taking a step back, I've tried to do things a bit more systematically and set up a number of copies in a grid with a range of brightnesses and I can now see a real difference. I don't think that any of them are satisfactory yet, but we can iterate and I think we'll get something useable.

In the end it's my daughter's homework and she'll have to experiment and decide what she is happy with.

Thanks for the pointers. I still don't really understand what's going on, but as long as my daughter's happy with her homework , I'll accept that.

MinuteNoodles

Make a picture up with different coloured squares...... one red, one blue, one green, one yellow, one magenta and one cyan. Print it out and compare the output to what is on the screen. You'll find that it's different. This is because there is never a match between how a screen outputs a colour and how a printer outputs a colour, especially at consumer grade. Put two different model printers together even from the same manufacturer and you'll find they both print those colours differently. 

Design and graphics companies spend serious money on top end screens, thousands on calibration and colour management to ensure that what is on the screen comes out of the printer but even then there's no guarantee. At the sign company my wife worked at they had a chart on the wall that they printed out that had around 250 odd coloured squares on and the value below them so they knew what a particular shade of red or blue or brown etc that they selected in Photoshop/whatever when designing an image would come out of the printer like.