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Photo Printing Tips:
Using 3rd Party Paper

As I said in another article, you can use third party ink jet paper but will need a lot of patience.  Well, there is some relief and it's called printer profiles.

Printer Profiles

What is a printer profile? It's a little piece of data, (a table); that your computer reads on the way to sending a print job off to your printer.  That profile manipulates the computer's signal to the printer to adjust the supply of ink in various parts of the color spectrum.  The profile takes into account the combination of printer, ink and paper.  End result should be that the print does a pretty good job of matching the image on your calibrated monitor.  Yes, there will be some differences if only because the picture is created by different methods: one is a reflected image (paper) and the other is a transmitted image (your monitor.)

Where and how do you use the printer profile?  First of all, you need to be printing from software that recognizes  profiles and knows how to deal with them.  Software such as:

  • Adobe Photoshop Elements, all versions
  • Photoshop almost any variety from 2000 onwards
  • Adobe/Macromedia Fireworks
  • Corel's Paint Shop Pro X also offers full International Color Consortium® (ICC) color management

These will fit the bill as will various Corel and other Adobe products and lesser known products such as:

  • Serif PhotoPlus (A great little British product)
  • Qimage, (a professional level photo printing program.   I use it - wonderful.)
  • Ulead® PhotoImpact® 12  (The program has a level of sophistication which indicates that it should have color management tools built into it, but I couldn't find any documentation to prove that.)
  • ACDSee Pro Photo Manager WIN
  • Open Window

Let's Get Started

One company which supplies printer profiles for their inkjet paper products is Red River Paper.  Needless to say, they don't provide profiles for every printer/paper combination on the market, (there are thousands); just for the more popular, higher quality photo printers. 

To find out more about Red River Paper and printer profiles follow this link:

http://www.redriverpaper.com/  

 
 
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