Printing: the beginning

A while back, I had promised my DW prints of my 5 best landscape photos so that she could do some fiber magic with them. For one reason or another, I didn't get around to it until today, where I brought out the only printer I have been able to afford so far: A Canon Selphy CP 760 portable postcard printer (not that I couldn't have gotten a bigger one, but there are priorities). It's small, prints only 10x15 cm, and uses a lot of ink and expensive paper, but it's a start. Later I'll get something that can do beautiful 33 cm wide panoramas and all.

At first print, my pictures came out very dark, much darker than they seemed on-screen. A quick bit of browsing revealed that a few brave souls had made printer profiles for the Selphy line, at least some of them. From this page, I downloaded the generic profile and the 720 profile and tried them out. The 720 was a bit better, but the colors still kinda muted. The generic profile, however, is actually really close to what I see on the monitor, with vivid colors and a pretty good feel to it. Makes me hopeful for home printing. I'll have to print the same pictures at my favorite print shop and compare.

This picture shows the difference, the left-most being with no profile, the middle with the '720 profile, and the right-most one with the generic Selphy profile. And before you say anything about overly saturated greens and Velvia disease, the early spring forest is actually that green in Denmark. I am in fact rather impressed that this little dude can reproduce it so well.