In this Adobe U2U forum post, U2U member Joe Soaper outlines how he solved his Lightroom Print issues with his HP printer:
After much sweat, tears, cursing, and perusing of the related print quality forum threads, I seem to have solved the issue which resulted in vastly different prints from LR when compared to prints using the same colour management settings in Qimage.
I’m using an HP D7160 with HP paper & ink, and the supplied HP profiles for the media (Premium, Premium plus & Advanced paper types) but was getting a virtually posterised output from LR, even after setting the correct profiles and allowing LR to manage the colour settings.
I also tried allowing the printer to manage settings using ICM – and the result was even worse than the LR output.
However, I stumbled across a web reference to .icc & icm file suffixes for profiles. The latter suffix is needed by windows to implement the profile – and it appears that the HP profiles (installed from their driver CD) had dumped them into the windows profile folder using the .icc suffix.
Changing the the suffix from .icc to .icm solved the problem and resulted in accurate prints from LR using application managed colour settings.
I have no idea why, when the profiles worked in Qimage when they were still listed with an .icc suffix – but changing to .icm now results in acceptable prints from both Qimage and LR.
Hope this of help to all those others on the point of taking a baseball bat to their printer
Thanks Joe. I saw this post (I think it was you) on DPReview and tried it too – I have an HP DJ90 and had the exact problem you describe. Changed the canned HP profile suffixes from .icc to .icm and the prints matched the output from QImage. I also posted my results on DPReview but not sure if anyone took notice. Thanks.