Photoshop Image doesn't print as it looks on the screen

Hi Mitchell6C1C

D.Fosse is right, taking a screenshot is no way to work with image printing, for one thing, you lose your image's resolution.

Try making a copy of the layered Photoshop file, first view at 100% as advised and then flatten it - before printing.

How is the appearance?

Now make the print.

If there is a change in appearance in the process above, when does it occur?

Tip:

Don't use the Absolute Colorimetric rendering intent, unless you are working on a CMYK press-ready file and making a pre-press proof and wish to preserve the 'paper colour' of the final print job as defined in the press ICC profile. Relative Colorimetric is a more suitable choice. 

I hope this helps
neil barstow, colourmanagement net :: adobe forum volunteer
google me "neil barstow colourmanagement" for lots of free articles on colour management
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I have the same exact problem. 

For me, the adjustment layers are "flattened" by Photoshop. This alters the image considerably.

So what I did was to use Snip & Sketch to copy the image from the screen. This wss saved as a jpeg. The outpu on my ink jet printaer then looked almost exactly as it did not the screen. To get it exact, I uploaded the jpeg to PhotoShop ^& printed it from PhotoShop using their absolute colorimetric setting. 

Just an additional comment. This whole phenomenon is a lot more complicated to explain, than the basic underlying mechanism.

Think of a checkerboard pattern of black and white pixels. You can see that a tonal adjustment of gray values won't do anything. A black pixel is still black, and a white pixel is still white. Nothing has changed.

Now downsample that checkerboard to half the pixel size. The checkerboard is gone; now you have a basically gray rectangle. A tonal adjustment is suddenly very effective, and you get a significant change in your preview.

This is basically what happens in your case. It's important to understand that the preview is wrong, but there's nothing wrong with your adjustment layers as such. When committed, they do what they're supposed to do.

Unless you view at 100%! Then the two match and are in full agreement.

You could argue that with today's hardware, it should be possible to always perform adjustment preview calculations on the full image data. It would slow Photoshop down a little bit, but probably not to an immediately noticeable degree. This is most likely too deeply embedded in the PS code to rewrite easily.

This is a classic, we get one or two every week 😉

Your image either has a lot of noise, or it's a "binary" image where individual pixels are either on or off.  In that case you get misleading adjustment previews when you are not viewing at 100%.

Previews are calculated based on the on-screen zoom ratio. This uses what is called the image pyramid, which is a series of cached downsampled versions kept ready to pull up on screen. This downsampling softens the image, and introduces a lot of intermediate values that aren't there in the original.

Only 100% maps exactly one image pixel to exactly one screen pixel. No downsampling, all the crisp pixel transitions are preserved.

In short, for a reliable preview, always check at 100% view. In a normal photograph this isn't an issue, but with increasing noise it becomes important.