aaaargggggghhhh!! HELP

[Boxy]

Before I strap my printer to my body and light the blue touch paper....Can anyone recommend an idiots guide to printing, preferably a book rather than online unless I can download and digest the info. It needs to cover the whole process from colour settings, colour management, printer set-up, resolutions, image size, profiles, sRGB, Adobe RGB, the whole lot plus anything else I've forgotten. I use PSE6 for editing so that's my point of reference.

Oh, and it needs to be in plainspeak

[Malcolm_Stewart]

I note that no one else has ventured a reply so far! The following works for me printing from Eos 5D, 30D etc. jpeg files, mainly straight out of the camera. My cameras are set to the normal default sRGB colour space. (The wider gamut of Adobe RGB can come later.)

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As I print from PS6 and have never worried about many of the things you've mentioned, yet get decent A4 & A3+ prints using 2 different Epson printers (R220 & 1270 for the larger prints), I thought it might be worth setting out what I do. If this works for you, you can then venture into colour space, profiles etc.

For starters, both my printers have been installed via their Epson CDs on a Win XP machine, the print heads are clear, and I've set the default to the A4 R220 printer.

I take my image into PS 6, edit if necessary (quite often I'll use Levels to lighten the mid-tones) and then I click on File, Page Setup. This brings up the Epson Printer window. I click on Properties, and use the next screen (the "Show this screen first" box is ticked) to choose my paper size, landscape or portrait, quality etc. I leave the "Color Controls" (near the Gamma setting window) radio button pressed (black spot visible) and ALL of the 6 boxes below for Brightness Contrast, Saturation, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow at 0. [If this doesn't sound familiar to you, click on the "Advanced" button.) Click on OK.

You're now back in PS 6. Click on File, Print Options, and if necessary click on "Scale to Fit Media". This should show you a small version of your image nearly filling the paper window. Click on Print. Click on OK, and if you've got the print preview enabled, click on Print (or Cancel if you don't like what you see).

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Most of the time the above gets me more than acceptable prints when I use Epson paper in my Epson printers. If this doesn't work, it may be that somewhere in Photoshop, colour profiling has been turned on - for starters, I'd suggest turning it off. If the procedure outlined above doesn't give a decent print, you need to get that sorted before starting to worry about other matters.

[Boxy]

Thanks Malcolm.I'll try your strategy and see how I get on.