My prints aren't looking very good?

If the colors in your prints are a little dull or lifeless and you are using the correct Color Profile then try working with a different Rendering Intent (see bleow).

If the colors are markedly inaccurate, for example blues are printing purple or reds orange etc. then this issue will almost certainly be the Color Profile you are using.

Click here for information on Color Profiles

Rendering intents
In general, actual printer color gamuts (the range of all possible colors which can be produced from a printer) will not be large enough to reproduce the desired color appearances that appear on your monitor. Four (4) rendering intents (gamut mapping styles) are defined by the ICC in order to address this problem. Each one represents a different compromise. The colorimetric rendering intents enable within gamut colors to be reproduced accurately (though possibly with compensation for the whiteness of the media) at the expense of out-of-gamut colors. Compensation can be made for chromatic adaptation when the viewing condition assumed is different to the reference viewing environment. The other rendering intents modify the colorimetric values as-needed to account for any differences between printers, media, and viewing conditions.

Relative Colorimetric Intent
This intent rescales the in-gamut, chromatically adapted tristimulus values, such that the white point of the actual media is mapped to the white point of the reference medium. It is useful for colors that have already been mapped to a media with a smaller gamut than the reference medium and therefore need no further compression. As such, when a color is out of gamut in the Print Job (the artwork), it is mapped to the closest possible color within the gamut of the printer's color space (the target), while colors that are in gamut are not affected. Only the colors that fall outside of the destination gamut are changed. This render intent can cause two colors, which appear different in the source color space, to be the same in the target color space which can lead to clipping i.e. areas that have smooth color graduations can become one block of color.

Absolute Colorimetric Intent
For this intent, the chromatically adapted tristimulus values of the in-gamut colors are unchanged i.e. colors match exactly with no adjustment made for white point or black point that would alter the image's brightness. This intent is useful for spot colors and when simulating a precise value of a given color model such as a Lab value.

Saturation Intent
For this intent, the relative saturation of colors is maintained from gamut to gamut. This render intent is primarily designed for business graphics, where the exact relationship between colors (such as in a photographic image) is not as important as are bright saturated colors.

Perceptual Intent
This intent compresses the total gamut of the Print Job into the gamut of the selected Media Profile's color space when one or more colors in the original image is out of the gamut of the target color space. This helps to preserve the visual relationship between colors by shrinking the entire color space and shifting all colors - including those that were originally in gamut.