Ok,

My wife is really doing well with the new camera (the Sony Alpha) and she is using a beta of Lightroom which she gets on well with.

We also managed to get hold of a very nice printer (Canon PIXMA Pro 9000 Mark II A3+ Printer, 4800 X 2400 dpi) and some decent paper - the results are really amazing.

However (and I'm sure you know whats coming next if you are a digital photographer) ..

..it's the age old thing of what's on screen not matching whats printed colour-wise. Things seem to come out darker, different colours, etc. Problem is, I'm not sure how to go about matching them up. We are not even sure we are printing correctly - do we have to install special drivers in Lightroom or have specific profiles for screen/printer?

Any advice would be really helpful as we are stumped :/

I don't know lightroom software.

Back in my offset times, where I did digital image composing, we had to have ICS profiles, both matching the screen and printer, having those profiles, is true wysiwyg.

However for printing, I suggest printing on professional services, it tends to be alot cheaper then printing at home.

You can try to solve the ICS thing, if the software does not have (will look into it, sucking lightroom atm), is to print a color wheel and grey pattern and try to tune the screen brightness and contrast to get to the closer result.

As soon as I have lightroom, I'll give more on this.

soz bad english.. drunken and stoned atm too...