[TriLUG] Picture Printing and HPLIP

[Ken M]

I thought I would send an update as I did sort most of this out.

First of all I had little success with regards to properly setting color management up.  I am going to call that my failing at the moment.

The solution was a couple fold.  First off I did have to slightly tweak some photos more in Gimp.  I started this process with Darktable but for final prints Gimp really did shine on getting the last touches dialed in.

Next off I needed to use photoprint which uses guten print.  The guten print plugin to gimp works as well but photoprint by itself is slightly better.  YMMV on that one, but that was my experience.

Next off my printer, an HP Deskjet 1512 is not directly supported by gutenprint but I can get guten to see its ppd.  However it also means borderless printing on the paper in it was not really an option.

Ok so along this journey one of the big tips and why I edited in Gimp is for printing I needed to edit the photos to be the exact size I wanted to print in inches as well as set the DPI resolution directly in GIMP.  Once that was completed the final of that was exported to uncompressed TIF to be loaded into photoprint for printing.

I started off trying to use 4x6 paper, but we wanted it borderless and that would not work so we switched to 8.5 x 11 paper then layed out three 4x6's on the page in an 8x10 space and then printed that.  So we had to then cut out the pictures from the master sheet.  The results were excellent.  Did have to make two present settings in photoprint to adjust contrast and gamma level on prints but that was it.

Hopefully someone reading this can save themselves the 2 full color cartiridges I spent to figure this out as well as all the photo paper.  However the end result is I have excellent photos for my purposes from my home printer.

Side note, my printer has two higher quality settings, best and HD photo.  At least as far as linux and pictures printed the output quality of best and hd photo are indiscernible.  The only difference is best prints faster and uses less ink.  Go figure but an accident caused that discovery.

Oh and another strange caveat.  HPLIP must know the paper size in its settings.  Changing it through photoprint and not hplip will cause issues.  Guten drivers just can't thwart that so if you experiment with different photo paper sizes be sure to set them in HPLIP the minute you load them.

Ken

On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 08:44:12PM -0500, Don Jerman wrote:
> Also try turning off photo options - I had a similar problem setting up our
> Brother laser printer (so not hplip related) where all the "photo print"
> options came out dark and slightly off-center.  Re-installing cups and
> printer descriptors paying close attention to the screens solved the
> problem.
> 
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 7:53 PM, Ken M <ken at mack-z.com> wrote:
> >
> > Two extra solutions I have found to try, krokus and turbo print, the
> > latter being a free trial but reasonably priced in my mind if it actually
> > solves the problem. To be continued... Since I just about ran out of ink
> > with previous attempts.
> >
> > Sent from my iPad
> >
> > > On Dec 15, 2014, at 5:24 PM, Randy Barlow <randy at electronsweatshop.com>
> > wrote:
> > >
> > >> On 12/15/2014 02:38 PM, Ken M wrote:
> > >> Now I understand they have a much higher quality printer than I do, but
> > it seems that if the issue is adjusting my image to the printer because of
> > the presentation of my monitor that printing the same image on their
> > printer would lead to the same dark results.  At least that is my
> > uninformed opinion.
> > >
> > > Keep in mind that it's possible that they may have automatically
> > > adjusted the photo for their printer.
> > >
> > >> I think the weird thing I got going on here is there are three
> > different print solutions on this machine at not one of them is the whole
> > package.  Incidentally I tried using lpoption and lp commands and I can get
> > it to hold like that but the print out is not fitting on the page that way
> > either.
> > >
> > > It does sound like something unusual is happening, but sadly I cannot
> > > offer assistance.