Once you've got yourself a profile for your printer, you need to install it to the right location (read about that here). Once that's done, how do you go about using it? Well, you need to use some printing software that is ICC profile aware - this means it will be able to find and use that profile when it prints an image. The majority of the more well known photo editors out there support profiles, but not all do, so please check first before you order a profile! (please note that Paint Shop Pro has recently introduced profiles, but it's not that easy to use. It will always load images into an sRGB colour space which you don't want to do with the profile charts).

The software ranges in price from the very expensive Photoshop ( PC / Mac ) - the industry leader - to the relatively cheap Photoshop Elements ( PC / Mac ) which is a cut down version of Photoshop that retains almost all the standard features that you might want. We would also recommend Qimage as a cheap printing program - whilst there are some image editing features, it's really all about creating drag and drop page layouts for one or more images, and getting the very best quality print out of your printer (it's also very good for resizing an image to print larger than it should do).

We've created some walk-through guides for the more popular software packages, which you can choose from the menu to the left.