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I'm trying to print on Canon Matte Photo paper from my Pixma Pro-1. Printing on Luster and Glossy paper works great, but when specifying that I'm printing on Canon Matte Photo paper, the darkest black I get is a medium grey. I get this using both the built in ICC profile and also a custom ICC profile made with a SpyderPrint. I am printing directly from Photoshop.
Any ideas what I could be causing the lack of deep blacks?
When choosing matte photo paper in the print box, the printer uses PHOTO black ink. The ONLY way to get MATTE black in to work is to use one of cannons "fine art" paper selections. I printed test prints on each setting using cannons color profiles each time using matte once and photo rag once. Then used the manufacturers for photo rag and matte photo paper.
When everything was said ad done, the images with their 35mm margin had deep deep blacks and once printed full page using matte photo paper setting, blacks were black but dull as all get out. Try it yourself. I am glad I spent the money on the cartridges to figure this out. People were complaining that the matte photos looked dull.
The engineers at canon (what a PITA they were to get to from the customer service reps) confirmed that the driver ONLY uses matte black ink when choosing a fine art paper drop down in the print box.
PS the only way to get the printer to use the "gray" inks is to tick "Grayscale" in the box before printing, otherwise uses black and other colors to create grays.
Dont take my word for it, try it yourself. take a black image in a small box, print once with matte photo paper and then again with photo rag settings. Use the same paper both times and same color profile. You will see a HUGE diference!
Hope I could help anyone who stumbles upon this in the future.
With some additional experimentation, I was able to determine there were two problems. The first is that it is actually rather tricky to disable ICC profiles when printing the test patterns for my calibration. Under the printing preferences, it is necessary to go to the Main tab and then select Manual color intensity. It is then necessary to hit the Set button, go to the Matching tab and select "None". This will remove any ICC profiles from being applied when printing calibration test patterns.
After calibrating, I was able to get a much better result, but the DMax is still really really bright. It looks ok in a dimly lit viewing environment though and colors are otherwise ok when viewed in a dark environment.
I had the problem of often getting a faded look from Canon's matte photo paper, while other times a nice, rich print emerged from the Pixma Pro-100. Finally, I figured out that the paper is coated on one side only!
It is difficult to tell the correct side to print on by looking at the paper, but one will be slightly whiter, the other being off-white or cream. Sometimes all you can do is try a print from one sheet of a ream, then be sure to face the remaining sheets the same way.
