How to improve printer colours?

[Roman5]

Hi all. I created an ad in Photoshop with a textured black background, a few lines of white text, a very large font title at the top in green, a smaller line further down in green, a blue smiley, a blue line of text, and added a logo at the bottom which has some red in it. I printed it out on A4 glossy photo paper. It has printed very nicely, with good bold black background and nice crisp white text. However, the green, blue and red are a bit dull to be honest. Where they look vibrant on screen, they come out quite lackluster and a bit darker than I expected. The red on the print is dark, almost indistinguishable from the black background, but it's a much brighter red on screen looking at Photoshop. Same with the green, a bit darker on print where it's almost luminous on screen.

I printed using my printer's 'Photo' setting. There is one more option on my printer which is 'Best Photo' but I'm not sure if it would really make much difference? Is it worth adding vibrance or saturation in Photoshop? If so, I'm finding everything grayed out in Image/Adjustments. Or should I try manually increasing colour, brightness, etc in my printer settings? The printer is an Epson XP-710. I'm quite happy to post both the photoshop ad and a photo I took of the print out if it would help you to see the differences. Worth mentioning that I use good quality compatible inks instead of Epson. Could that make much difference in colour quality?

Thanks.

 

[Layback Bear]

If it was my printer, the first thing I would do is clean the printer head with the program that comes with the printer. Then print a test page. If that didn't solve the problem I would install Epson OEM ink cartage's and see if that solves the problem.

Jack

 

[Mellon Head]

Keep in mind that your screen is backlit and the paper you are using is not. There is bound to be a luminosity difference between paper and the screen. Colors will not be as vibrant as they show on the screen, unless your printer's photo setting compensates for this fact. Some printers do not.

I would agree with Layback Bear. Use the standard OEM printer cartridges. I would also print in "Best Photo" mode, on good quality photo paper and see if that makes any difference.

 

[Roman5]

Thanks for the replies guys. I hear what you say and it would make sense to try OEM inks. I'll try best photo first.

 

[samuria]

Its not your printer but your monitor it needs calibrating to your output so what you see on screen is what you see on printout How to Calibrate Your Monitor: 11 Steps (with Pictures) - wikiHow

 

[Wandering one]

The only way is to print everything BEFORE doing the black background, then print the background
as a second pass with all the previous print set to white, which is actually no ink as the paper provides the white colour. Things like this can be a bit of a challenge but if the indexing is good on your printer the results will be impressive. Bye the way OEM ink will not change a thing except your wallet.
Art.