Printing Photographs with Canon Pixma MP180

Hello friends

I own a Canon Pixma MP180 printer. Recently after acquiring my D90, I have decided to take some print out of the photos rather than going to any Photo Lab.

I have never printed photographs with this printer of mine, so please help me out in printing, how exactly should I approach the whole thing so that I get best possible result out of this printer.

To test, I have taken print outs of 4 photos on a A4 Photocopier Paper (ordinary paper, mainly suitable for document printing), through Picasa3 but the colors do not look great, I would say that colors look blotchy.

I shoot RAW and save the files to highest quality JPEGS with 300dpi resolution. The color-space I use to save JPEGs is sRGB.

Please help

Thank you

The nost important things for getting good results for any photo printer are:
1. Make sure the photos are prepared on a color calibrated monitor with a luminance target of 100 +/- 10. If the brightness of the monitor is too high, the prints will come out dark.
2. Use a color profile for your printer and ink set.
3. If printing out of Photoshop, let Photoshop manage the printer colors, don't let the printer manage it.
4. 300DPI is fine for the photo file but select at least 720 or possibly 1440 for the printer resolution

View the print under D5000 lighting rather than incandescent, or possibly mid day sunlight to make a determination of how close it resembles the monitor.

There are a number of tutorials and ebooks out there on color management and printing that you might do a Google search for. We also have an article here on NSN to help you get started:
http://www.naturescapes.net/docs/index. ... t-printing

Thank you so much for the excellent reply...

You'll find most tutorials are for Epson printers but the basic process is the same for Canon or HP. Just some of the print driver screens might look a little different.

SRoyC wrote:To test, I have taken print outs of 4 photos on a A4 Photocopier Paper (ordinary paper, mainly suitable for document printing), through Picasa3 but the colors do not look great, I would say that colors look blotchy.

As I'm sure you realize, in addition to following the tips/flow in the articles and tutorials, that paper makes a huge difference. You simply have to use good photo paper and an appropriate profile for your paper/printer combination. The easiest thing to do is purchase Canon brand papers, which should have profiles available for your printer. But there are lots of third party papers/profiles out there too. (And sometimes you can find a profile for the same ink you have, even if the same printer model isn't listed. Several Canon printers probably use the same inks as the MP180.)