Printing photographs

If you have a printer that prints pictures at a good quality - and you cant wait to take your images to be printed at a photolab - make sure that you are using the best available settings on the printer. If you are printing from Adobe Photoshop or Elements it is better, in many cases, to let photoshop handle the "colour management". This means that you need to disable the printers own colour management preferences and make sure that Photoshop or Elements is set to use the programs colour management. I am using a Canon iP 4300 and have found that this produces the nearest print colour to the screen. The printer controls on both these Adobe products are excellent when used this way. In my experience, allowing the program to tell the printer what to do, seems to give the best results in whatever Image Editing system you use. While I am on the subject of printing I have found that printing from Adobe Lightroom doesnt give so many possibilities as Elements and Photoshop itself. The main thing it lacks is the control over how the image is enlarged or reduced to fit a print size. I have been printing 6inch x 4inch prints from digital images taken on my Minolta Dimage 7i. As the format does not fit the print size I have been adjusting the magnification, slightly, to fill the print area - you can't do this in Lightroom. This surprises me as the print engine must already exist for the other programs so why not use it on Lightroom? Maybe someone will let us all know. It is a waste of time and money if you have to keep swapping from one program to another merely to output your work.
You can regard the previous passage as part of my ongoing assessment of the Adobe products.