[TriLUG] Picture Printing and HPLIP

[Ken M]

I am having an issue with picture printing.  First off the details:

Linux Mint 17
HPLIP version 3.14.10 (Current as of yesterday from their site, not the Mint/Ubuntu repos version)
Printer is an HP Deskjet 1512
Cups version is 1.7.2

Ok so this is the first time I have really tried to get my home printing solution fully on linux.  It is why I got an HP printer.  My previous lexmark required Windows.

So the problem is that although most printing tasks work fine, photo printing is dark.  So my google-fu yielded that the problem is color management.  Played around with Argyll but I guess I don't get it.

Installed Gutenprint and tried that throught both photoprinter and the gimp plugin.  Gutenprint does produce a print that is the proper color/brightness but it will not properly use the page setup.  Can't print a full page print, in fact it wants to print 2/3 of the pic on only the bottom corner.

Normal printing from say gimp uses the page properly but the picture is dark.  

So printing direct from HPLIP I know the gamma/brightness/contrast settings I need to use to get a proper picture.  I can set those in HPLIP and print from there.  When printing direct from HPLIP the image color looks great but it does not allign properly on the page either.  Not as bad as Guten but it seems to leave the last 1/4 of the image hanging off the page.  No idea why.  Also even though I have made these the main settings for hplip other programs don't seem to print through there so even though I changed hplip the picture is still dark.

Now of course one option is to edit the image just for print.  Which I don't like.  I looked in CUPS and there is no gamme/brightness/contrast settings for the printer.  I also looked at the ppd file I have in /etc/cups/ppd and there are no entries for these settings.  Not sure what to do here.  I was thinking cloning the ppd and altering those settings in the ppd and then adding the same printer as a second printer for just image printing would work.  Kind of running out of ideas of what to do.  Don't know the ppd structure well enough to know if I can add settings for gamma/brightness/contrast.

Anyone dealt with this before.  I see a lot of chatter out there about this issue but does not seem anyone really has a lot of concrete solutions.  I like my cloned ppd idea....

Ken