Strange Printing Problem

[TonyW]

Scratching my head over this one. I'm trying to help my brother-in-law 5000 miles away with a brochure he's working on. Basically he's taking images out of Elements and inserting them into a Word document and scaling them down in Word to fit the brochure. Almost all look fine in Elements and Word and print fine (I think he has an R800). One doesn't - it looks and prints OK in Elements but in Word it looks OK but prints dark and with loss of detail. The only difference that I can see is that the one image he's having trouble with started smaller than the rest so is scaled at around 90% in Word rather than 20% for the others but why that would make a difference I can't explain. I think we've confirmed that that is the problem as I resized one of the good images down and sent it back and at his end it now prints dark out of Word.

And here's the real puzzling part. If he sends me the Word document and I print it with my R300 it looks fine. And I can't repeat the downsizing making it look bad here. So we're sort of stuck not knowing if it's a problem with his Word or with his Printer.

Typing this I realised that we should try upsizing to see if that fixes the problem (glad I decided to ask the question :)) but I still have no good explanation as to why this should happen.

Anyone seen anything like this or knows what might be causing it?

Tony

[Codebreaker]

Tony....

Remember I had a similar problem when I had a letter head in Word that suddenly lost colour. All looked good on screen but wouldn't print correctly.

Paste a similar colour from Elements and it still looked good on print but the two printed differently.

It's still happening to this day and the only thing that fixes it when printing from Word is to turn on ICM in my printer driver.

I know that Word isn't Colour Managed when it comes to printing but that never explained why it used to work then stopped.

Might be worth a try!

Colin

[TonyW]

Colin thanks, we'll give that a try. I also got a blank stare (over the phone :)) when asking whether he'd updated the printer driver as I gather there were some dark printing issues with an early driver so we're trying that too. And it also sounds like the problem image got excessively downsized by mistake (although that didn't bother my Word/printer) so we're correcting that as well. At least we've gone from no ideas to lots of ideas :D

Tony