Photography

Ah. Yes. Welcome to part of my world.

This is a persistent, but more or less solved problem in the fields of professional graphic design and press, but home users are going to have a tougher time of it.

TL;DR: You're on the right track, here. There is a system for this called ICM — Image Color Matching. You need an ICM or ICC profile for your printer, which professional-ish image editing software will be able to load and use to tweak its display output in order to more or less match its appearance on your screen to the final output from your printer. This will come in the form of a .icc file.

If you have a decent printer the manufacturer may have been kind enough to provide this for you as part of its software and driver package. If you have a professional class printer, they definitely did. If you have a cheap consumer printer, probably not.

My considerably less than professional but not quite entirely dinkum Canon ImageClass laser printer did, and if I'm doing anything heavy duty enough that I really care about what its output looks like in print, I can use it in Corel to give myself a good preview and adjust my image edits accordingly. This process isn't 100% perfect, but it's a damn sight better than nothing. Having your monitor calibrated to begin with certainly helps, but your monitor's calibration doesn't actually have anything to do with the relationship between the colors it's outputting to the colors your printer will output. Just, if your monitor is out of whack you'll be chasing additional phantoms around and driving yourself nuts, because you'll be layering one inaccuracy on top of another.

If your printer doesn't have an ICM/ICC profile available for it, your best bet is to hope that some dedicated nerd on the internet has produced one for it with a color profiling tool and made it available for you to download. Otherwise, you'll have to buy or build your own color profiling tool to generate your own off of a test print. (I believe you said you had one.) A better cheap-as-free solution would be to use the ICM profile from a different similar printer of the same process (inkjet, laser, whatever) and resign yourself to the conclusion that it'll have to be better than nothing.

Part of your problem is probably your software. Whatever you or she is using to design and print has to support color profiles, and you'll have to learn how to use them with that particular piece of software. I use the Corel suite and it makes it pretty easy for me, but that's an expensive license that I didn't personally have to pay for, so I kind of made out there. You actually can apply an .icc profile system-wide in Windows as a brute force approach, but this probably isn't a good idea if you're going to use that computer for everything else. Content that's had its colors remapped to match a particular print device's output are only going to look right in that particular context and will be out of whack compared to everything else. You probably don't want to apply your printer's ICC profile to your entire machine's user interface and all webpages, for instance.

Or maybe you do. I don't know.

First of all, color laser printers aren’t great at accurate color. They are meant to print graphs in a business report, not photo’s, art or anything that requires proper color reproduction.

Calibrating the monitor doesn’t change what comes out the printer as such. What it does is ensure that the monitor shows the color that the software is trying to display as accurately as possible. This is necessary for the next step.

Next you need to download the color profile for your printer.

The important thing about color profiles for your monitor and printer is that they not only adjust the colors but also contain the limitations of the device.

Your printer cannot display all colors that your monitor can. There is also the difference in that a print is reflective and a monitor is emissive. That is: monitor is basically a lamp. When calibrating your monitor make sure the brightness is set to match the general brightness of where the print is going to be displayed. 80 to 100 cd/m2 are common values.

Next you need to find the ‘soft proofing’ function in your app and select the printer profile. This will show you what the print will look like. This is why you need to have the monitor calibrated otherwise it can’t accurately display the simulated colors. Often there’s also an option to highlight the colors your printer can’t reproduce. You can then adjust your image to your liking within the limits of your printer.

Oh, you poor bastard. I don't know enough to actually solve your problem, but I do know enough to know it sounds like a perfect storm of every possible way the problem could be harder:

• random monitor that isn't even IPS, let alone designed for color-calibrated professional work
• a laser printer, which is much, much worse at producing vivid colors than other printer technologies (I know from personal experience as the owner of an older Brother color laser. The prints are crazy washed-out compared to even a cheap inkjet. That's fine for my use, but not your mom's)
• trying to help an elderly parent that not only struggles with the mental model of what the computer is doing (e.g. the bit about recalibrating the monitor and expecting the print colors to change), but can't see well to boot
• not having the professional graphic design/print shop background to understand how the workflow is supposed to work

For what it's worth, my wife is a professional graphic designer who designs stuff to be physically constructed (not "printed", per se, but built from pre-colored materials and/or painted) and even she apparently doesn't work in a color-calibrated workflow. She just deals with the actual product being different from what's on her screen.

Frankly, this is the kind of subject that gets exponentially more complicated the further down the rabbit hole you go. Pantone built an entire business on trying to get it right, and charges a lot of money for their stuff. I'm leaning mostly toward the "maybe we're just being unrealistically picky about color parity" option for your use-case.

That said, I think you could do better on the printer. Even inkjet ought to be better despite the glue issue, with judicious choice of paper and/or ink, but you might also want to look into more unusual printer technologies, like solid ink, thermal wax, or dye-sublimation.

Or maybe say "screw it" and have your stuff printed at a print shop. Let the trained employee handle getting it to come out the same color as it shows on screen.

(By the way, where are the pics of the MCM dollhouse??)

Edit: Oh yeah, I forgot:

I also tried taking a photo of a printed page next to the monitor to show the color disparity here, but the difference in color on the photo is basically imperceptable (but in person it's not).

That just adds yet more layers of complexity, LOL! Lighting, white balance and other camera settings, software post-processing of the image, etc.

When you need to match the monitor to a printer, you have two different color spaces and have to restrict yourself to only the overlap in colors between those spaces, and even that is still restricted to certain lightning and backlight color tone as well as your lights' color rendering index (you need high CRI light to make quality print look good).

Ideally you'd both have a HDR capable well calibrated monitor and a printer with more than just CMYK, like 6 inks (but some go beyond that, these do 9 inks; https://supergamut.com/product/the-hydra/)

Printers use ink, cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). This is subtractive colors which means all colors mixed in equal parts is black. Monitors however mix colors using light which is additive, Red Green and Blue (RGB) the presence of each of these colors results in white. So when you’re looking on your monitor it’s very likely you’re looking at an image generated in this manner. But your printer is thinking in CMYK leading to the discrepancy. You can compensate for this sometimes by changing the color profile to CMYK on some monitors- or more likely (since it’s an old monitor) in the settings of the image editing software. You may also want to consider a better printer depending on how old it is. I’d suggest looking into the settings and try printing some test pages https://www.internet-ink.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Colour-Test-Page-scaled-1.pdf see if any of the colors look particularly skewed.