There’s as much to go wrong in the digital darkroom as there ever was in the wet chemical era, so you need troubleshooting knowledge if you want to avoid lengthy conversations with technical support.

Knowing what can go wrong with your photo printer is more likely to make you realise that something really is wrong, instead of accepting that those little white lines that run the length of all your prints are actually unavoidable.

Remember, you shouldn’t have to put up with anything less than excellent; that’s the standard all inkjet printers are now capable of reaching.

In this DIY Photography Hacks guide we’ll run through the most common problems you might encounter with your inkjet printer, and a host of possible solutions. Work your way through these and you’ll have a good grounding in printer maintenance.

There are stacks of models out there, so online troubleshooting for your specific printer is a good idea before you attempt
any major works!

Common photo printer problems and DIY solutions

The first port of call for any print quality issue is to check the basics: have you done something silly?

Selecting the wrong paper type, printing on the wrong side of the paper, overloading the sheet feeder, printing on curled paper, using a low resolution setting, failing to install ink cartridges correctly or not replacing an empty ink tank are all common sources of problems, and can lead to streaks, banding (visible lines), or uneven printing.

If you’re sure that none of the above are the source of your woes, your next step should be the printer maintenance section of your printer’s driver interface.

There should be nozzle check, alignment check and cleaning cycle options – running these can solve the vast majority of problems.

PAGE 1: Common photo printer problems and DIY solutions
PAGE 2: Troubleshooting common photo printer problems
PAGE 3: Paper feed and alignment errors
PAGE 4: Nozzle and roller problems
PAGE 5: DIY photo printer prevention techniques

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20 questions you need to ask about how to print photos
Colour management: fine tune your kit for the most accurate colours possible
Monitor Calibration Made Easy

Producing a colour print that closely matches what appears on your computer screen is something anyone can master if they understand the principles involved and have invested in the kit needed for producing accurate colour. Discover how easy it can be to turn out predictable and pleasing results.

Colour calibration: An Introduction

In our experience, the idea of a ‘colour space’ is what drives most people crazy as they begin in colour management.

Any colour can be represented as a point in space inside a sphere (see the diagram below). Somewhere within that colour sphere sits the position that describes your chosen colour. It can be represented mathematically as a point on three axes within the sphere. A colour space describes the size and shape of a 3D box that sits within the sphere.

If any of your colours are too strong for your chosen colour space then they’ll simply spill outside the box and that’s called ‘being out of gamut’. In digital photography there are two common colour spaces: sRGB and Adobe RGB.

The first is the default colour space used by most digital cameras and the default colour space of most computer monitors. Both sRGB and Adobe RGB use red, green and blue to reference colours.

However, colour inkjet printers use a combination of cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks. This is because if red, green and blue inks are mixed on paper the result is a horrible muddy brown mess.

In order to translate the colour that appears on your camera’s LCD or your computer screen, we need colour management. In practice, this is really just complex arithmetic that calculates instructions for a printer to place dots of yellow, magenta, cyan and black ink on paper in order to mimic the red, green and blue colours that you see on screen.

With the best will in the world, there’s no way that a series of ink droplets can exactly match the colour that appears on your computer screen, but we can get very close indeed – and we do this by
using colour management.

Once you’ve profiled your monitor and printer using the methods on the next pages, you can then make a test print of one of your photos to compare what appears on the screen and what comes out of the printer.

Before you do that it’s important to understand how light can wreck your colour perception. It’s no good trying to assess your colour prints under the light of a tungsten table lamp or by the flicker of a fluorescent tube. Use daylight to assess your images and you’ll see the real colours.

When you hold your test print up to your computer screen for comparison, it’s important to realise that you’re never going to see a perfect match.

A screen that uses red, green and blue dots of light to create an image can never exactly match the reflected light from a piece of off-white paper that’s covered in droplets of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink. But with good colour management, you can get very close.

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20 questions you need to ask about how to print photos
10 tips for preparing and selling photo prints

Your digital darkroom, aka your PC or Mac, is where the magic happens – where you transform the images captured by your camera into the dynamic masterpieces you originally envisioned when you were behind the lens. Whether you’re just tweaking a raw image to get the perfect result, or going that little bit further to rescue a bad exposure, here’s all you need to get started.

Printing at home

These days, even the most humble home photo printers are capable of producing results that rival the output of any high-street printer. Pay a little more for a model that uses multiple shades of the four base ink colours, and you’ll achieve unrivalled quality. Of course, you pay a premium for this quality and convenience, but there are ways of keeping the costs down…

Printer

For the best quality prints, choose a dedicated photo printer rather than an ordinary colour printer. Many photo printers are now ‘all-in-one’ models, offering printing, scanning and copying in a single desktop unit. Prices start at £50 for an A4 printer. Some models have eight individual inks, which may mean higher costs.

Paper

For genuine photo quality, invest in high-quality photo paper. The main decision you have to make is which finish to go for. Canon, Epson and Fujifilm all make their own glossy and matt papers – you’ll usually get the best results with the same brand as your printer. For fine-art printing, there are plenty of third-party providers.

Ink

The biggest cost of running your photo printer is replacing used ink cartridges. One option is to shop around for compatible third-party inks. You could save as much as 50%, though you may not get the same guarantee of colour fidelity or light-fading resistance offered by the manufacturer’s own brand.

Image-editing and storage options

Laptop or desktop?

Laptops are more fragile and often less powerful than desktops. However, if you like the idea of editing your images on location, or just lounging on the sofa, a laptop’s the way to go. Prices are falling all the time, and you can now get a decent Windows 7-enabled laptop for around £300-400.

Card reader

Many PCs come with slots for SD and CompactFlash cards, but using a USB 2.0 card reader is still the preferred option for image transfer. They do tend to sap power from a laptop when downloading images, so it’s best to have your notebook on charge so you don’t suddenly lose power, or worse, your pictures.

Screen

Glossy screens look great, but they are highly reflective, which can result in unwanted glare. Matt screens produce much less glare, but care with positioning is needed to prevent images from looking flat. Whatever you opt for, calibrate it to ensure accurate colour reproduction.

Software

Most new SLRs come with raw-processing and photo-editing software, but it can be hard to use or rather basic. The most popular raw editor is Adobe Camera Raw, which is bundled with Photoshop Elements 10, Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3.

Storage

If you regularly shoot large volumes of raw files, storage can be a major concern. As an example, 300 16-bit 12Mb raw files require 8Gb of storage. Even if you only edit a third of these files and back them up once, you’re still looking at around 24Gb of storage. An external hard drive with a capacity of 500Gb – because drives can corrupt and laptops can get stolen – plus a DVD burner for backups is the best solution. This set-up would be enough for 30 8Gb memory cards, which would probably keep you going for a year.

Back to: Flash modes explained

Forward to: Essential accessories

Digital Camera’s 10-part series ‘Teach Yourself Photoshop’ builds into a complete video reference library. These easy-to-follow video guides will take you on a start-to-finish journey through perfecting your photos in the digital darkroom. In this video you’ll discover how to get better prints using Photoshop Elements. Find out how to use Colour Management, how to scale the shot for print and more to make sure you get great prints from your printer. Click the links to the right and build up the complete collection with each new issue of Digital Camera.

Buying a printer for your photographs is a decision not to be taken lightly as you’ll want to get the most from your images when you print them out. With a baffling array of printers on the market to choose from, you could be forgiven for not knowing where to begin. Follow our handy hints and advice to make sure you get the best one.

Buying a printer for your photographs is a decision not to be taken lightly as you’ll want to get the most from your images when you print them out. With a baffling array of printers on the market to choose from, you could be forgiven for not knowing where to begin. Follow our handy hints and advice to make sure you get the best one.

Many digital photographers rely on internet printing services, from mass-market companies like Photobox to professional-quality outfits like Loxley Colour. But high resolution photo files equate to lengthy upload times, followed by an even longer wait for postal deliveries, and all control over the printing process is taken out of your hands.

Apart from a few ‘postcard’ format printers, which still use dye-sublimation technology, inkjet printing is the order of the day and most manufacturers claim that their current models can rival or even surpass the quality of conventional silver halide printing. But photo printers are defi nitely not created equal, and there can be a surprisingly wide variance in the finer points.

When buying a printer, it’s worth remembering that you’re also buying into a printing system that includes the manufacturer’s ink and photo paper supplies. Indeed, in many cases, a complete set of replacement ink cartridges will cost almost as much as the printer itself. It might be tempting to switch to lower priced, third-party ‘compatible’ ink cartridges and photo papers but, in our experience, the quality usually suffers noticeably for document printing, and horribly for photo output.

We’ve also experienced much greater problems with nozzle blockages, resulting in light stripes printed across photos, when using inexpensive third-party inks. The chemistry between ink and paper is a surprisingly complex one.

Whereas layers of different, translucent colours can be laid over each other in dye-sublimation printing, inkjet ink is opaque, so very small droplets of ink need to be laid next to each other on the page to build up complex colours and smooth graduations.

This is why much higher print resolutions are required for inkjet printing compared with dye-sub printing, the droplets of ink being incredibly small and measuring only a few microns across. Premature fading can be caused by UV light, fluctuations in temperature and humidity, and gases in the air like ozone, nitrogen oxide and sulphur oxides.

All of these factors are taken into account in the development of inks and papers, and how they work together, so that in most cases genuine supplies can create prints, which will last a lifetime, either in photo albums or framed behind glass. Independent tests have shown that, by comparison, prints created with cheap third-party inks and paper can start fading in just a few weeks.