My workflow is to output a ProPhotoRGB Tiff from LR to QImage, and print on my Canon Pro 1000 using the paper manufacturer's ICC profile. Recently I've had some prints come out with a bad color cast that makes people's skin looking like they're suffering from serious sunburn, when in reality their skin is light brown.

My expensive Dell monitor is calibrated and profiled using an i1Display Pro so I'm confident there is nothing wrong with the image I'm seeing on screen.

I've noticed this problem only when printing color prints to Canon SG-201 Photo Paper Plus Semi-Gloss paper, which has been my go to paper recently. Black and white prints are great. Sadly I printed to 4 sheets of 22 inch paper before I realized what was going on. All the prints exhibit the color cast. Prints I'd printed earlier in the year to the same paper had been fine. QImage version is 2018.112.

From here on in, this is above my pay scale: I wondered if it was a QImage bug or a mistake I'd made, so I printed a small portion of one image straight from LR in the margin of one of the failed prints, and printed correctly (i.e. no cast). Then I printed another in-the-margin small portion using QImage, and lo and behold, it came out right too. No cast!  Now I don't know what is going on. If I print another big print, will I waste more paper and find its reverted to the same problem as before? And just to be clear, yes I have set LR / QImage to manage the profile, not the printer 

One variable in all this is that before doing the small portion in the margin test print, I needed to change several ink tanks, including the red and the pink. However I'm not sure what difference if any that could make considering how much ink the Pro 1000 keeps in its lines.

What do you suggest is my next step? I hate wasting the 22 inch paper. It's rather pricey, especially considering I'm printing for personal use.

Thanks for reading.

Hi Damon,
I have the Pro 100 and that paper is also my "go to" paper and after a year and some of printing a lot, no problems.
Let me ask a few questions.
In the attached screen snaps, can you precisely corroborate that your settings are the same as mine?
a) The same profile showing in 142.  
b) Quality settings in 143
c) Most important, the Matching set to NONE.

That being said and done, it smells like the colorspace Prophoto is set to be over ridden in LR.
Resave your tiff in a proper color space like Adobe RGB or use the Qimage Convert and resave your tif and allow the conversion to RGB in a new Tif.
Bet that fixes it.

If all that passes the vetting test, please try a nozzle clean and recheck.

A simple way to test would be to hover your mouse of the thumbnail and read the hotbar at the bttom. What is the colorspace of the image?

Not suggesting that at all. Just have seen images flatten out with faded color when that color space is used. It is a very wide gamut, so much so, that it exceeds the monitor by miles, the printer by miles, and most of all that paper by miles. So really little to gain by using it.

Let's see what you get from a nozzle clean.  As Terry pointed out, all things set the same, LR and PS and QU will all produce the same color.
If there is a difference between prints, there's a setting (software or driver) that is different.
There was a possibility that colorspace could be different. ,,, and of course, nozzle clogs.   The nozzle clogs bothered me due to your description of the color cast only on SG 201 Semi gloss paper, and the rest of the description:
 'From here on in, this is above my pay scale: I wondered if it was a QImage bug or a mistake I'd made, so I printed a small portion of one image straight from LR in the margin of one of the failed prints, and printed correctly (i.e. no cast)."
Just trying to touch all the bases.
Fred
 

Hate to be picky picky, and you are burning cash...... but can you do a real nozzle clean. Seems like above, it was a check.
Probably is OK, but burn a few cents more and make sure.
One other item. What is your driver version?   Mine is 2.97.82. My reason is that there have been reports that the latest W 10 update messed up certain printer drivers. A few HPs and the Pro 1000. The XPS driver for pro 1000 got messed up by no longer being recognized if paper size was larger than A3.
The W 10 liaison said it will be fixed next month.
The last thought I have is asking you to  try a print (Make 4 x 6 or 5 x 7 on one sheet and run it through twice) using the profile for the Luster paper. Just on the chance the profile went bad.
How else can you explain the cast issue only on Semi Gloss paper..... unless of course, the box of paper was stored in an extreme environment.

I am out of ideas Damon.
Happy Holidays.
Fred

I've now retested Qimage vs LR on letter size Canon SG-201 Photo Paper Plus Semi-Gloss. LR prints the color image without a cast, i.e. the print is as expected. Using the exact same print settings, Qimage prints the image with an red / pink tint, which is especially visible in the skin tones, ruining the print. Nothing has changed since updating the drivers and media configuration.

Black and white images seem to be unaffected (I enable the black and white printing setting in the driver config when printing B&W).

Given LR prints a fine looking image, I conclude the problem is unlikely in the printer hardware itself. Perhaps there is a bug in Qimage, or the Win 10 + Qimage combination?

Change the profile to Let Printer Manage color.
Change driver setting from NONE to ICM
The rest is the same.
Print

Fred

I have checked several times that the printer settings are correct. That's the first thing I checked -- and rechecked, multiple times. I understand the importance and meanings of each of those settings.

Changing the print quality setting from standard to highest is a curious suggestion. It makes no difference to the problem I'm facing (I've tried both). Why would it affect a problem with a serious color cast?

From the link to the 2011 post, the only step I did not do is "Potential Pothole #4". Those instructions are now dated. There is no "Printer Setup" in the "File" menu. In any case, that seems to indicate that Qimage settings can become silently malformed when something external to it changes, like a driver. And somehow, LR is unaffected. To be honest that does not engender a feeling of confidence in the reliability of the program. Why does Qimage not proactively warn the user that they should set up the printer again from scratch when something external to the application changes, like an updated driver? Speaking as a programmer here for a moment, it's hard to imagine why Qimage could not track driver versions. And in the case of my particular problem, unless Canon is silently updating their drivers (which I doubt), the print cast problem came up before I manually updated the printer driver. So if a change external to Qimage has messed up Qimage settings, it's not the driver.

What I'm suggesting is that Qimage alert the user when the printer driver that is installed on the system has been updated since Qimage was last run. Do a version check at start up, and if the version changed alert the user to re-setup their save print templates. To me that seems a better solution than expecting the user to have seen a bullet point on a discussion forum posting from 2011.

I just did another (and my final) test print. First Qimage, then LR. The Qimage print came out identical to the LR print. The only thing I changed was reselecting the Pro 1000 from the Printer/Media panel in Qimage and check that everything was set correctly. Whereas yesterday, with the exact same settings, the Qimage output was bad.

This inconsistent output recalls the first post in which I reported this problem: (1) Qimage print, bad output. (2) LR print, correct output. (3) Qimage print, correct output. All with the same settings.

I'm not planning on making any more prints with Qimage, given the inconsistent nature of the output. By coincidence my subscription ran out a week or two ago. I'm not planning on renewing it.