I need help getting colors synched between my iMac and Pixma Pro 200

[harry_9906]

I am stumped on how to get my iMac screen and new pro 200 printer colors synched. I've tried printing from different applications with the same results, what seems like the black point being unaffected by adjusting the brightness of an image. Colors themselves are acceptable but darker. I'm moderately technically astute but have been unsuccessful so far after following the canon how to threads.  Help would be greatly appreciated.... Harry

[Conrad C]

One good place to look is in the articles on Keith Cooper’s Northlight Images web site, such as this article:

10 reasons your prints look wrong
The most common problems in printing your photos

One common problem, as Keith says, is dark prints caused by editing images on a display that’s set too bright. This is because no combination of paper and ink (which can only reflect the light in the room) can match the higher brightness levels of today’s displays. A common solution for dark prints is to lower the display brightness to a range more comparable to print. For example, on some Macs I’ve owned, if I want the display to better preview the print, I need to set the display to half brightness or less. If you use a measuring device like a display calibrator, you can set this precisely; many experienced print pros use their profiling/calibration software to lower display brightness to between 90-120 nits (a.k.a. candelas per square meter).

If your colors are acceptable but the prints are too dark, maybe that is all you need to do. 

If you think the colors could be improved, you can make sure settings are coordinated among:

• The Print dialog box in Photoshop 
• The macOS print options (which you get to by clicking Print Settings in the Print dialog box in Photoshop)
• The Canon-specific printer options, which are in the Printer Options section of macOS print options 

The main challenge when printing is that today’s displays can reproduce a much wider range of tones and colors than any combination of paper and ink. So the goal is not to make the printer match the display, because the printer is less capable than the display. A more realistic goal is to simulate, on the display, the limitations of the printer. An advanced way Photoshop helps with that is soft-proofing, which uses a color profile of your printing conditions to more precisely simulate on screen how colors will look using a specific printer, ink, and paper combination. The way it’s described in this article by Bruce Fraser in 2000 is still the way it works today in Photoshop:

Soft Proofing in Photoshop 6.0