So I've got this awesome 4 year old dye-sub printer, an Olympus P-400. It works great on my PC. But I just got it printing on my mac with gimp-print and the color is alllll bad. It looks like muddy green waste was dumped all over it. Everything's this washed out green color.

I have this issue on the PC with B&W prints, but it's easily fixed by changing the green gamma in the Olympus driver.

I've downloaded a free P-400 profile that I've successfully used on windows, but it seemed to have little effect on the mac.

I've tried dicking with it in Photoshop to try and come up with a recipe that looks okay under mac printing, but I never get far and each print is costing $2 a pop... so I'm reluctant to just keep trying.

Really I just need solution that I can replicate, either in the form of a Photoshop script or a working .icc profile that fixes it.

I figured since I bought the printer on a recommendation of a posting here several years ago, and since you guys are the greatest bunch of folks I'd post my problem here.

I've seen several software calibration solutions, but these require a decent flatbed scanner. I've got a slide scanner, and a digital camera, but no flatbed. I could buy one cheap, but a cheap scanner would probably make the created profile more screwed up than the way it is now.

I've seen only one software/hardware solution ... the Pantone PrintFix ... you presumably print one of their test images, then run it through their own scanner do-hicky for analysis ... sounds awesome, but so is the price ... $300-$400 ....

Questions for you guys:

Does anyone here have a printer calibration solution for my printer/setup?
Does anyone have the PrintFix solution that I could rent from them?
Does anyone have the PrintFix solution that I could mail a test image to in exchange for a profile?
Does anyone have any other solutions that I'm not considering.

Thanks for any input!

Greg

God, is there anything to be done about huge long threads bumping stuff down off the page before it's a couple of hours old?

Nope about the bumping stuff off.

You're pretty much stuck with either buying a scanner off a list that is supported by a colour calibration tool or sending off a sample print to somebody. There isn't any other way of doing it unfortunately. You have to compensate for the scanner used which means needing to get one which has a known profile. Are there no cheap ones available that have a suitable profile already?

I don't mind sending a print off to someone ... I guess as far as buying a scanner, if I'm going to buy one I'd want to buy a good one just to start out right, but even then I really don't even ever have a need to use one with the exception of this particular situation.

Maybe I'll look at a software only solution then see if anyone wants to donate some time scanning a print and emailing back the digital file.

The ColorVision software worked quite well with my Epson 1270 with 3rd party ink (way different gamut than stock) as well as a stock 2200. This used a moderately cheap scanner with good results. (Microtek, I think I paid around $150 for it)

Nothing ever calibrated the scanner itself.

No, I don't understand how it worked.

All I know is that after calibrating the printer and the monitor, I could hold a test print up to the screen and they were a dead perfect match.

Yeah, colorvision sounds like the right solution, they make the pantone option (PrintFix) ... but unfortunately they're so damned expensive.

Have you tried the Olympus driver? It doesn't seem to have been updated in a while so might not work with Panther or Tiger.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/15472

Yeah, unfortunately it was pretty shoddy to begin with and it stopped working after a few minor releases of OS X.