95% of the time someone complains about their prints being too dark, it’s a simple solution: their monitor is too bright. That’s old news.

Here, on the other hand, is something you might not have discovered before:

I had my prints suddenly go too dark just last week, and found an unexpected solution.

History: I’ve been printing and building my own profiles for many years now. I’m currently using an i1 Photo Pro 2 with 1600 patches, on an Epson 9890. For about a year, my self-made profiles were spot on.

Then last week, the prints started coming out too dark. The colors were just fine, but the prints were evenly too dark. Given that I teach this stuff, it was going to be pretty embarrassing if it was “your monitor’s too dark.” (It wasn’t: I keep it at 85 cd/m.) I even made prints on some cheap paper using various different profiles: and frankly could not even see a difference ! So I spent a day trying this and that and questioning my sanity.

Yes: I had recently re-profiled my monitor, and yes, I’d made some, but not a bunch of new paper profiles, and X-rite had come out with a new version of their software, so the answer had to be in there somewhere.

Then I had a vague memory of something that plagued the color printing world back in 2009: years ago regarding version 4 profiles.

And my new monitor profile was version 4, although I had habitually used version 2 in the past.

You can see where this is going. I reprofiled the monitor creating a version 2 profile and I did several (I’ve got a task ahead of me) of my paper profiles as version 2 as well.

Bingo: everything is printing spot-on again. (I did drop the old printer profiles vs the new ones into ColorThink Pro, and the dark/light points were the same, although the color gamut was different.)

Yes, version 4 is old at this point; yes, version 4 profiles -should- work… but, while the process of profile-to-PCS-to-profile is well known, the actual waypoints along that path wind through the OS, and the printer drivers and the software, and if something, somewhere, isn’t happy with version 4, (doesn’t handle it properly) the whole process goes south.

Which is apparently what happened to me. I wish I could offer up what was absolutely the single culprit in this odd scenario, but I can’t – just too many moving parts.

On the other hand, making sure that everything was version 2, instead of version 4, once again fixed an unexpected and odd issue.

hth
ymmv