“my prints are dark”.

Assuming…

• these are prints of photos (and not the calibration color patches)
• you are allowing the application to manage color (as you stated)
• you are using reputable glossy or lustre paper (which?) so that you have access to reliable ICC profiles and don’t have to worry about problems with mat/matte paper
• the printer driver is set to the right ICC profile for your printer/combination (profile source?)

…this usually means your monitor is not properly calibrated (set too bright, use 120 cd/m2 or less). Your monitor can simply be brighter than typical room lighting. You print can never have brighter white than room lighting. You monitor can. So “prints too dark” almost always means “monitor too bright”. Calibrating your printer will make very little difference compared to using ICC profiles from your paper vendor (HP, Ilford, whoever).

In fact, I would first get basics right by calibrating your monitor and getting the printer settings right. Thus postponing actual calibration of the printer using the ColorMunki. If all is setup well, you will find that the fine-tuning using the ColorMunki produces a minimal change which you might not even be able to see.

how to print the color patches. I printed with the option application manages color. But it didn’t do it.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t win a prize for clarity. Prints still too dark? Or printing of color patches failed? Or calibration using ColorMunki Photo failed?

My guess is “prints still too dark”. And my guess is that it is due to the monitor being set too bright (this is a standard problem, and the standard solution). Once you fix the monitor part, it will look a lot darker on screen (like on paper). And then you can decide how to tweak the image.

If this doesn’t solve things:
* check Youtube for how-to videos
* Google on “prints too dark” and confirm my suggestions. E.g. Northern Light has a good posting with that title.
* get a book or DVD on color management or Luminous Landscape’s DVD on “Fine Art Printing”. It is cheaper than the Colormunki and may pay for itself in terms of less wasted prints.
* send me screen shots of the relevant setup menus: device driver, Lightroom/CSx, Colormunki (I will send you an e-mail)
* there is an HP B9180 support group on yahoo groups. Check their archive: you will certainly find “prints too dark” there.
* once you get more confidence with the basics, try being more precise on what you are doing. I bet (hope) XRite support doesn’t normally give up on customers… they could have provided all the above info with no specific knowledge about the HP printer.

Peter

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks,

ranjan

Hope this helps,
Peter