Five common printing pitfalls and how to avoid them

Personally printing a special image you've made gives you complete control over the final results and can be a deeply satisfying and fulfilling experience. For Jay Sinclair, a product intelligence professional at Canon UK specialising in printing products, producing the final print is the culmination of the whole photographic process.

"Making an image in-camera is one thing, but for me it only really comes to life when it's printed," he says. "It's a very different way to experience an image – apart from anything else, you can see the image at a much larger scale than you do on the back of your camera or a laptop screen. I'm passionate about encouraging people to print their images."

Getting your images to look exactly as you want them can be technically challenging. However, if you follow the correct steps in the printing process, you can soon produce images that meet or even exceed your expectations.

So what are the most common printing mistakes people make when starting to produce prints? Here, Jay identifies five issues that frequently arise and the best ways to avoid them.

2. Selecting incorrect paper profiles

An ICC (International Color Consortium) profile contains information that allows a printer to reproduce accurate colours on a specific type of paper, so it's important to select the correct ICC profile when making a print. Jay says: "An ICC profile basically tells the printer what type of paper you're putting into it, what type of ink it needs to have and how much ink on paper you need to create your photo.

"All photographic papers have different white points. For example, two types of paper might both be white but one will be pure white and one more yellow. If you have the wrong ink going down at the wrong time, reacting with that colour paper causes problems.

"If you don't select the correct ICC profile, the image can come out looking completely different. You could calibrate your screen and do everything else right but if you select the wrong profile, your image is not going to print the way you want it to."

4. Choosing the inappropriate Rendering Intent

Printers are not capable of producing quite as wide a range of colours as your camera has captured. Within a colour-managed workflow, you can use the Rendering Intent setting in the Print dialogue to tell the printer how to deal with colours that fall outside its printable range or colour gamut.

Perceptual aims to preserve the overall visual impression of colours in an image. It will map out-of-gamut or clipped colours to the closest-match printable colours, then adjust the other colours to preserve the relationship between them. "This means many colours may change, but if your screen is correctly calibrated, you'll be able to evaluate this by comparing your soft proof image with the original," Jay says.

Relative Colorimetric maps out-of-gamut colours to the printer's nearest reproducible colours, but won't alter in-gamut colours. Generally it preserves more of the original colours in the image than Perceptual, assuming that not too many colours in the image are out of gamut. "You may get slightly less saturated colours, but brightness values will be most stable with this rendering intent," says Jay. "This makes it the ideal choice for near-neutral and black and white images."

5. Issues with competing software

To get the best possible output quality on Canon's imagePROGRAF PRO-Series printers, you should use Canon's Print Studio Pro or Professional Print & Layout plug-ins. "These programs were designed by Canon to make the printing process easier," says Jay. "We provide the tools to do all your colour management, whether it's hard proofing or soft proofing.

"Printing in Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Photoshop can lead to problems. It's not an issue with those software programs themselves, it's an issue with them competing with the printer driver to manage the colours. Both try to manage the colours at the same time and add their own colour processing. Because both Print Studio Pro and Professional Print & Layout were designed by Canon for Canon printers, you'll avoid that issue, so it simplifies the whole process."