Canon Pixma Pro 100 Color Issue

Hello everyone. This is my first post in here and I hope someone can help educate me on my issue with my canon pixma pro 100 print.

I'm printing a relative straight foreword image created in windows paint. The colors are predominantly out of gamma.

That means the colors are thrown off, and it mainly affects the two big squares in the image.

The big problem is the border of greenish yellow around the inner edge of the big squares. It is supposed to be one flat color with the symmetric shapes inside of it.

I have now made quite a few prints on different papers and different settings but they all come out with this 'blemish'.

Please give your thought and help me understand my issue.



Tech info:

Canon pixma pro 100 bought second hand but in good printing condition with oem ink in it.

OEM ink is now replaced with (about 2-3 years old) Octoink that I got from a photographer who used to use it for his pro 100

Printing from qimage 2022.117

paper: canon mp 101

icc profile: mp 2/3

rendering intent: Saturation - charts/graphs

Black point compensation: ON

Automatically control driver color mgmgt when possible: ON

Dithering: None

Thank you!

Is it possible that the areas are showing severe banding from the out of gamut colors being downsampled incorrectly because your colors are outside of what the printer is capable of?

I can’t really tell from your photo what’s happening. It would be helpful to have a 100% crop of the affected area. Also it would help to be able to compare with a 100% crop of the original file.

I just want to make sure I’m clear on something though: the colors in the file are mostly falling outside of the gamut? This is a major issue that could cause all kinds of problems including what you see in the print.

_T_ said:

Is it possible that the areas are showing severe banding from the out of gamut colors being downsampled incorrectly because your colors are outside of what the printer is capable of?

I can’t really tell from your photo what’s happening. It would be helpful to have a 100% crop of the affected area. Also it would help to be able to compare with a 100% crop of the original file.

I just want to make sure I’m clear on something though: the colors in the file are mostly falling outside of the gamut? This is a major issue that could cause all kinds of problems including what you see in the print.

Click to expand...

I really don't know what is happening. I'm still pretty new to the technical aspects of printing.

Here is the soft proof from Qimage, showing the out of gamma areas.



Original crop Print Crop



I hope this can help.

Hi, I don't really follow exactly what is going on with your tests, but perhaps I can offer a test for you to try.

If you think that the printer itself is the problem, you might try removing it from the test. It doesn't seem to be well known that you often have the option of "printing to a file." When you go to select the printer to use, you select a "file," or whatever the exact terms are. Then, with this new "device," actually a file on your computer, set it up with the same "printer profile," etc., as you have been using with your Pixma printer. Give it a filename that you can find easily in a search, as it might be buried somewhere in your computer system.

After doing the "print to file," open the file an see if the artifacts exist in it. If they DO then you know that they are not a result of the Pixma printer.

FWIW this print-to-file image will have the pixel values changed, to the pixel values that would have been sent to the Pixma printer. But... the appearance of the file (in a color managed system) should appear similar to the original file. This is because of the complicated operation of the ICC profiles. A printer profile has a backward-looking set of translation tables, which the system knows to use in this case. So even though the pixel values are now changed, a color-managed system will attempt to show the file as it SHOULD appear on an actual printer. Out-of-gamut colors will be clipped according to the limitations of the printer. For your purposes it might be worth looking at the actual RGB pixel values in the output file; I dunno if they're useful to you or not.

FWIW I've never used Qimage; it's possible that it might try to defeat the test I've described. If so you might try printing directly out of Windows. I don't recall exactly how, it might be a right-click on the image to start out. I'm sure a number of people on this site will be glad to step up and explain the process.

Ps, I think the term you meant to use is "out of gamut," not gamma. (Gamma is normally used to describe the slope of a line, as in measuring contrast. Whereas "color gamut" means, more or less, the range of color strength that a system can work with)

Best of luck with your experiments.

Emobil said:

The big problem is the border of greenish yellow around the inner edge of the big squares. It is supposed to be one flat color with the symmetric shapes inside of it.

Click to expand...

I also see a vertical (orientation in your original example) color defect/deviation in the right-hand big square that only appears between the lozenge shapes. I've increased contrast on a little snippet to illustrate it:

I wonder if it might be a problem with smeering or ink bleed due to a viscosity problem with the 3rd party ink you're using. If I were to hazard a guess, the yellow ink has a different viscosity than the OEM ink, resulting in a bleeding problem where the nozzles basically keep bleeding ink for a little while after they should have stopped jetting.

My suggestion would be to go back to OEM inks and see if the problem goes away.