Print Density Setting no effect

[Hythloday]

This color laser printer has a problem in how the images end up printing too dark and black by far, and I can't seem to fix this.    Some articles say that I can change the print density in the HP device toolbox web page.  I have tried changing all the print density settings to the lowest (-5) that this web page offers, but I don't see any change on the printer when I try to print an image.   I'm just testing the printer from the Windows picture viewer.   How can we enable these density settings so that they actually do something with the printer?

[Hythloday]

So this is weird.   If I use the Windows print option from right-click, then the HP print density has the opposite effect from what people are saying.   For instance, my dark image looks even darker if I change midtones and shadows to -3 and -2, but the documentation argues that we should use negative numbers in order to produce a lighter image.   What's going on?  

Furthermore, I find that Adobe Illustrator ignores all settings elsewhere and always prints everything too dark no matter what.   The windows photo app seems to miscalculate the image so that it ends up with streaks or bars of different brightness, so that is unacceptable.   This is all using the PCL 6 driver.   Maybe I'll try again with the Universal driver or the postscript driver.   I just hope that I don't exhaust my very expensive cartridges just printing out test images.

[Hythloday · Accepted solution]

Well, the good news is that I can get a decent print if I use Adobe Lightroom with the PS driver and a custom color profile, since Adobe lets me assign a brightness adjustment to the print profile.   The print density HP toolbox doesn't help, though.   I just have to remember not to expect more than draft quality prints from any program besides the Adobe ones.