Thanks Dave!
Tried some of your tips, no go though.
As you said cheap printer.
There's a chap in Clare that does high quality reproductions of art work, so I'll take the images to him and save the headaches.
Cheers,
Justin.
Quote:
Originally Posted by naskies
Sounds like you have a problem with crushed blacks - it's a very common problem with consumer level printers. I've seen many printers crush grayscale levels from 0 to 50 (or even higher) down to solid black. It's a bit like how many point and shoot cameras over-stretch and over-saturate their pictures to make them look "better", but in reverse.
You can check whether this is indeed happening with one of these test images (especially the black and white test image):
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/a...st_images.html
If this is the problem, then the best solution would be to create a custom printer profile, similar idea to a calibrated monitor profile. This with deal with the crushed blacks and non-linearity of your printer, but it's not really worthwhile doing if you have a cheap printer (results will still be poor).
A quick-fix you could try is to compress your dynamic range into something the printer can handle. Open it up in Photoshop, open the Levels tool, and change the output range to say 50 to 255 (but level the other settings at 0 / 1.0 / 255). That should give you more detail in the blacks, albeit lowering the overall contrast.
Another quick fix is to enhance the local contrast of the tail. Create a duplicate layer of your image in Photoshop. On the bottom layer, use the Unsharp Mask tool with settings such as 30%, 30 px, 0 (play around with a few settings such as 10% / 10 px, 20% / 20 px, etc) - you'll see that it will make the tail detail really pop out. Gently mask it in with the other layer and you should get an image with an enhanced tail - try printing that one?
If none of these ideas work, then I think your best bet may be just to have them printed by a pro lab - I know they'd look fantastic from my past printing experience. |