Printing astro images at home

[Ouroboros]

I want to print some astro images to put on the wall. Nothing fancy. Just for my own pleasure really.

I have an Epson ET-7700 Ecoprint printer.  It's quite a good workaday printer for documents. Perhaps not the best for printing photos, but it should at least produce acceptable prints. I've owned ordinary printers before and they've been fine printing acceptable though not exceptional prints.

The following is a comparison between the screen image of M31 processed in Pixinsight (left) and the same image printed from Affinity Photo app on a MacBook and scanned on the same printer. It was printed on Kodak Premium Photo Paper (gloss). 

As you can see the printed image has a horrible green glow around the galaxy, a glow that is absent from the screen image. The rescanned image looks a tad more saturated in intensity than the printed image does by eye. 

Any thoughts on how I improve this?  Thanks.

 

Edited March 18, 2020 by Ouroboros

[MarkAR]

The green halo looks like its picked up more detail. No idea how to get rid though.

[Ouroboros]

13 minutes ago, MarkAR said:

The green halo looks like its picked up more detail. No idea how to get rid though.

Yes. It’s almost as though the printing has stretched the image.  
 

I have noticed that the affect is worse on the more expensive Kodak paper than it is on the cheap paper from Tesco! 🙂 Unfortunately I don’t have any A4 Tesco paper. 

I guess it’s something to do with how the printer software interprets the colour profile of the image. I believe there are ways using a SPIDER or similar to calibrate how the image is printed. I don’t have on of those. 

[pete_l]

2 hours ago, Ouroboros said:

Any thoughts on how I improve this?  Thanks.

Well, you can adjust your monitor colour profile until it matches what your printer prints.
Or you can adjust your printer colour profile so it prints what appears on the screen.
However, unless either one is calibrated so that it faithfully reproduces a standard image, you won't have an integrated system to start from.

Maybe the way to go is to get a professional print shop to print you a colour test-card and start adjusting your monitor to faithfully display that/

[MarkAR]

I'd be tempted to get a professional print done.