Troubleshooting Photos –
Colors Changed Dramatically In Print
Problem
Colors in large areas of the print are totally different from the colors in the computer file.
Note how the grass is late-summer brown/green in the top of the picture then becomes all bright green. Similarly the people in the background have normally colored faces but their legs are as oddly hued as the girl players' skin. normal is a correctly colored print that accurately matches the on-screen image.
What should you look for?
The first reaction is that all the color is totally wrong. But that's not true – while the people at the top of the picture have green legs like the girls, their faces show normal skin tones. Some of the grass is green, some is the brown of midsummer. So, something changed while the printer was running this picture.
The green skin is not only the alarm-bell, it's the giveaway to what went wrong. One ink color in the printer – in this case, magenta – has clogged up or has run out so the color mix is dramatically askew.
Now, why would a missing ink make the girl's skin turn green? In commercial printing, the available colors are made up with the four CMYK inks: cyan (a light blue), magenta (reddish), yellow and black. The skin of Caucasian people is printed with an approximately equal combination of magenta and yellow, plus a bit of cyan. The cyan prevents the skin from turning orange, plus as the darkest ink, it provides the detail and modeling on the skin.
Take away the magenta, and you've got yellow plus just enough cyan to make – tada! – green.
"But that doesn't make sense!" you cry. "If there's no magenta, how can the other girl's shirt be red. Surely that needs magenta?"
And so it does – red is printed with a combination of magenta and yellow. But magenta is a tricky ink – it doesn't quite cover the range that is required for a pleasing range of color. In commercial printing, that's not a major problem because you don't have the original subject available for comparison. With your own pictures, you're more critical – if you've often got the subject right in front of you, it's easy to tell if your daughter's skin color is right or wrong.
In the printer that printed the green girl – as in many photo printers – the solution to magenta's limitations is to use a light and a dark magenta; together they produce the full range of hues needed to convince people that they've got a good print. In this instance, the magenta used in skin tones, and incidentally, to modify the grass color to a more appealing hue, is the one that clogged or ran out. The magenta used in deep reds like the shirt kept on printing, so the shirt printed a bright red, and just about everything else printed green.
Many photo printers also use both a light blue (cyan) and a darker blue. Therefore, a similar problem can also crop up in colors that depend on cyan or blue ink. Since cyan is usually used for rendering fine detail, that covers a lot of colors.
What should you do?
Open your printer's utility program. First, check the ink levels. If one or more ink levels is low, install a new cartridge. If there is ink in the cartridges, run the printer's head-cleaning routine.
How do you fix it?
There's nothing you can do with the print except show it to children and tell them this will happen to them if they don't eat their vegetables. Follow the steps above and reprint it.
Printers are supposed to warn you when they're low on ink, but it doesn't always happen. They don't warn of clogged jets, either, as happened here, so it's worth taking some preventive action.
- Many printers go into a special head-parking routine to minimize clogging when they're turned off; if yours has this routine, try to remember to switch off if you're not going to use the printer immediately.
- If the printer has been idle for a week or more, open the printer's utility before you use it for a print and run the nozzle check routine. This prints a simple pattern on plain bond paper and the amount of ink it uses is tiny, so the cost is close to nothing. For a few moments of time, you'll spare yourself the frustration of spoiling a sheet of photo paper.
- Also, consider checking your ink levels when you do a nozzle check, so you have a sense when it's time for a change. This is a particularly good move if you're about to make a print that's larger than normal.
