Colours are shifted when printing from any program in Windows XP

[Guest]

A few months ago I installed CorelDraw 10 on my Windows XP system. After
that, my Canon BJC-3000 printer started printing washed out colours. Red came
out as orange, magenta as pink, etc. After uninstalling CorelDraw,
reinstalling the (admittedly quite old) printer and trying everything I could
think of, I was still getting washed out colours.

I now have a brand new Canon iP3000, but the problem persists, and is
affecting *every* software program on my system, including MS Word. The only
colour that's not having a problem is black (so at least text printing is
okay).

Anyone have any idea what's going on?

 

[Chuck]

It would seem that a color profile (usually an ICM file) was created or
activated by Corel Draw, and left active after the uninstall. Check the
monitor/video card settings/options for something like StdRGB or a monitor
specific color correction file. Do the same for the printer.
Deactivate/remove those you find.

See if that changes or eliminates your problem.

Whatever you do, use a reference color image that you have not modified.
http://home.att.net/~arwomack01/#files
Some of the links from the above page should lead to various color reference
files.

A similar set of curcumstances caused my printed images to be much darker
than desired, until I backed out all the color compensation and reinstalled
the printer driver.

 

[Guest]

Thank-you for the suggestion, but either I'm doing something wrong (rather
more likely than not I'm afraid) or my printing problem isn't the one you're
thinking of.

I spent the better part of yesterday learning about icm and color profiles.
I went to the windows\system32\spool\drivers\color diectory and uninstalled
every icm profile I could find. I also went to the printer and monitor
settings and looked for anything remotely related to color profiling, and
uninstalled them too.

After uninstalling and reinstalling the printer, I tried several more test
prints (thank-you for the standard test image by the way) and eventually got
so frustrated that I simply deleted all the icm files.

There was, however, one icm file I couldn't get rid of. "srgb color space
profile.icm" in the \drivers\color directory presents the message "An error
occured while uninstalling srgb color space profile.icm". And if I delete the
file, Windows automatically re-instates it from somewhere. I'm kind of
assuming windows needs it for some reason.

I even ran the printers default test print page, and the windows logo at the
top of it was still showing washed out colors.

Any more suggestions / instructions would be gratefully received.

 

[Chuck]

It's quite unusual to have both the printer's output and the display washed
out together. The symptoms, coupled with you actions, seem to have
eliminated any reasonable hardware problem. It would also seem that the
involved software must be at a level common to both the printer and the
display. Since this normally occurs at a system level, and not at any sort
of application level, (Other than the color compensation system) its getting
hard to point to a possible culprit.)
I suppose that there might be something like a gamma level set to high
somewhere, but cannot think where it would be that would hit both the
printer and the display. From your remarks, the color reference file must
have printed light as well.
About the only thing I can think of at this point would be to try a registry
restore to a point before you installed the application that caused the
problem. This can be fairly traumatic, so I look at it as close to a last
resort.

The fact that the SRGB profile could not be uninstalled says that the color
compensation system is most likely still active, at least for one device,
which will usually be the display. There is one other thing called
"rendering intent" that can cause odd problems, but I don't think it's
likely that the application set it to something other than the normal
condition. A few of the older high end graphics apps could, if the user
drilled down far enough into the settable options.

If you right click on the display wallpaper (not an icon or the taskbar) you
should see a popup appear with properties showing at the bottom. A left
click on properties should bring up a "Display Properties" window. Left
click on the setting tab toward the upper right of the window. A new display
properties window should appear, and have an "advanced" button. From this
point, the next window becomes quite video card/chip dependent. My ATI card
has two color related tabs. One allows setting gamma graphically, and the
other allows you to enable or disable, install or remove the display related
icm file. The gamma set area normally has a graph with a line(s) going from
the bottom left to the right top of the graphics sub window. I'd be tempted
to see if the gamma settings will change the display appearance to something
reasonable. (Divide and hopefully (eventually) conquer.)

The last time I bothered to look, the color compensation docs in MSDN were
out of date, and a bit confusing.
The general idea hasen't changed, just a lot of the details.

 

[Guest]

My display is fine. I have no problem whatsoever with the monitor. It's only
the printer that's giving me grief.

I didn't realise I'd implied there was a problem with the display. Is the
"srg color space profile.icm" file purely a monitor color profile? That might
explain wht windows kept replacing it when I tried to delete it.

I did think it was strange that even the button called "Print Test Page" in
the Printer "Properties" window was producing washed out colors on the
printout (even though it was just the little windows logo at the top of the
page).

 

[Chuck]

When you uninstalled Corel 10, it's possible (now likely) that something was
left, perhaps because the printer was active at the time. There may have
been "cannot remove or uninstall" warnings about specific DLL's that were
installed or modified by Corel. Since the printer is washed out, and not
the display, the possibilities are reduced by quite a bit.
Within the printer driver are several options that will change the amount of
ink placed on a page. Have you played around with these? (A set of sliders
is usually present, allowing more or less ink to be used on a given page.)
Does the printer have a built-in button combination actuated nozzle test, or
a test used to see if the printer is OK?
The current driver for the ip3000 printer is on the canon website, and si
shown as 1.80a

If this were my system, I'd uninstall the printer driver, then shut down and
reboot with the printer disconnected.
Next, I'd look at the registry for anything that relates to the recentally
uninstalled printer, and remove any leftover entries. This is not something
I recommend to any but those with a lot of registry knowledge, or those that
have a written ununstall process from the printer OEM.

 

[Chuck]

Another tidbit is that Corel mentions use of the windows cleanup utility
described in the below url.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;290301