Canon Pixma iP4500 - problem with colours

[Mike Clarke]

On Thursday 02 October 2008, Roland Smith wrote:

> Gimp uses Gutenprint doesn't it? So you could try using the
> gutenprint driver?

That's the odd thing, CUPS is (supposed to be) using the gutenprint 
driver. Here's a list of the relevant packages:

kestrel:/home/mike% pkg_info -Ix cups gutenprint
cups-base-1.3.7_2   Common UNIX Printing System
cups-pstoraster-8.15.4_1 Postscript interpreter for CUPS printing to 
non-PS printers
gimp-gutenprint-5.1.7 GutenPrint Printer Driver
gutenprint-5.1.7    The "meta-port" for GutenPrint
gutenprint-base-5.1.7 GutenPrint Printer Driver
gutenprint-cups-5.1.7_2 GutenPrint Printer Driver
gutenprint-ijs-5.1.7 GutenPrint Printer Driver
libgnomecups-0.2.3,1 Support library for gnome cups admistration

After a bit of fiddling about with the printer settings for the Gimp I 
can get tolerable results when printing from the Gimp, though still not 
as good as the Windows drivers give. Printing from any other 
application just produces totally wrong psychedelic colours. There's an 
example showing an original file and a couple of scans of prints at 
<http://www.milibyte.co.uk/colours.pdf>. The images have lost some 
quality in the scanning but effectively demonstrate what's happening.

CUPS is using the ppd file extracted 
from /usr/local/share/cups/model/gutenprint/5.1/en_GB/stp-bjc-PIXMA-iP4500.5.1.ppd.gz. 
I'll not post the contents here ( > 2000 lines) but there's a copy at 
<http://www.milibyte.co.uk/Canon.ppd> if anybody's interested.

-- 
Mike Clarke