Printing colors off. Please help!

I am getting very fustrated trying to get prints to match. I understand there may be variances in the way an image looks on screen vs. paper, but I am just way off over here.
For example: An overcast shoreline scene with no color in the sky other than grays, I am seeing light shades of cyan and magenta in my print. What's up with that? When I post to the web and look at the image on another screen, it looks fine, just like it did on my screen.

First, I am using a 27' iMac with CS5 along with a Epson Stylus Pro 3880.
I just calibrated my screen using Eye One and I set my luminance to 120.
Overall brightness of the image is pretty good but the colors are off and the overall image looks very flat, especially in b&w.
In my print settings I always choose the Epson paper I am printing on and choose PS manages colors.

I don't understand why I am having so many problems.

Thank you in advance for any help you can offer.

Johnathan, can you post a screen shot of the PS Print Dialog Box and a screen shot of the Epson Print Dialog box?

Your screen luminance sounds about right (my NEC is 110 cd/m^2). What contrast ratio is your monitor using? If it's too high, any print will look flat. What paper are you using? Are you using the correct "black" ink for the paper, i.e. Photo Black, or Matte Black. In my experience I sometimes have to boost the contrast a bit for a larger print.

If you are seeing color in B&W prints, I would suspect the image profile is in an RGB color space and there is some cyan and magenta in the image. Also, you might have a clog in one of the ink carts. You should run a nozzle check from the Epson utility menu. If there are gaps in the check print, you'll need to run a head cleaning.

Screen shots will really help us diagnose this.

--P

Preston, thank you for your response. I have been working on this issue all day and finally found that a couple of color profile settings were wrong and that in my printer settings even though I had selected PS manages colors that I had to dig a little deeper in the menus to realize that the printer was still set to manage colors. Changed a few things and printed an image with much better results.

Man I love color management !

Thanks again, Jonathan

Oh by the way. How do you do screen shots anyway?

Johnathan,

To make a screen shot of all open windows, press the Print Screen key. This copies an image to the Clip Board. If you only want a shot of the active window, press Alt+PrintScreen. You can then paste the image into a new document in PS, crop as needed and then save as a jpeg. You may need to sharpen a bit.

There is a very nice program called Snag It. It is a full=featured screen capture program. If you do a lot of screen grabs, it will be cost effective.

--P

Screen shots on the Mac can be done in many ways. Probably the easiest way for you is to start the Grab application. Simple to use. Give it a try.

Windows 7, if you have it, added the "Snipping Tool" which you can use to draw a box on any part of the screen and save directly as a JPG.

I missed the fact that Johnathan is using an iMac. I hope my reply above wasn't confusing.

For Windoze users, mine and David's solution do work.

--P

Thanks Kieth, I found the grab app, would have never known it existed on my computer and your right it is simple to use.

@ Preston, I was only confused for a second.

Thanks for the help guys.