[Gimp-user] not to knock gimp...I love it, BUT I have never has decent prints from it

[Joy H.]

>I am far from an expert, and have only used the XP calibrating tool 

Ah, there's something I don't know about!  What IS the XP calibrating tool? 
Where would I find it?  I read the gimp help manual info on calibration but it
said I had to access these icc files that I don't have.  Is the XP calibrating
tool a feature of XP rather than gimp?


to
>attempt to calibrate my monitor (hardly a definitive tool), so my prints
never
>match my monitor exactly, but they are certainly more than acceptable to
view.

Mine are acceptable - but I'm trying to produce a portfolio for actually
marketing my photos, so I don't think acceptable is good enough.

> Faces still look like faces, grass like grass, etc.  

Yeah, mine too, they're not THAT bad!  - but colors come out too strong or
detail is lost in darker areas, stuff like that.

>If your prints are that
>bad, there must certainly be some disconnect between your Gimp settings 

Where would I find Gimp color settings?  Other than the calibration
instructions that I don't seem to be able to follow at all given the files
that came with my printer (i.e. no .icc files, or they actually seem to be
embedded somewhere, because I did see a message that said "using
something-or-other.icc embedded file to print grayscale")

>and
>the printer's settings.  Perhaps you have both Gimp and the printer set to
>make adjustments to the final print (not certain, frankly, if Gimp's
printer
>interface 

I'm not printing from Gimp any more - now printing from Word, which deals
with the sizing problems easily, but has no impact on the color problems.

>includes the option to select/deselect >software/printer control.  I
>don't think my problems were ever as bad as what you >describe, 

Well, I might just describe things worse than you do!


>but I did go
>through something similar trying to get acceptable skin tones in some of my
>portraits.  One thing I tried along the way was to download what I consider
to
>be a minimalist viewer to use strictly for printing.  The application that
I
>used was Irfanview - it's free, and you can open and print from it without
>worrying that it will try to auto-correct your photos.  I don't know if you
>are running Linux or Windows, and I believe it to be a Windows only program
-
>not certain.

Running XP. I've printed from MS Paint and from Word, and that doesn't seem
to make a difference - can't print from gimp at all because of the sizing
issues.  But either Word program is the same.

>
>. . . but there are probably Linux viewers that will print without
>automatically trying to correct or adjust the images.  You might want to
try
>one.
>
>I am certain that calibration would improve the accuracy of my colors, but,
>unless you are doing work where that high degree of accuracy is necessary,
I'm
>not certain it's all that critical.  Leaves should be green, sky should be
>blue, the exact hue of both is best left to you, LOL.

Well, but I'd like them to look like what I see on the screen.  If I could
calibrate my screen so it looked like the printer, then I could make
intelligent adjustments in gimp, because what I'd see would be what was going
to print out.  

>
>Good luck in sorting out your problems.

Thanks for your help!  If you could refer me to the "xp calibrating tools"
that might help!



Joy


-- 
Joy H.