Quality comes out weird
I just got a Brother DCP-L3560CDW printer and am printing some test pages for my proxy cards. However, I am experiencing some issues with the quality of my prints.
They come out prickly and with clear lines, somewhat unreadable text in certain places as if it has been smudged, and with muted color. I understand that the cards of my printer will never be as amazing as the ones printed by industry machines, but the quality is leagues under that of the quality before print when inspecting them in the PDF.
I make my cards in pokecardmaker, import them into photoshop where i refine the quality of text and add custom made icons, then import the refined card into a PDF before printing.
I have included a pic of a test card, as well as the result of print on paper.
I'm using A4 160GSM paper, not glossy, and have also tried with regular A4 paper but get the exact same result.
I've tried tweaking the settings on the printer to use more vibrant colors, used both settings for thick and thin paper, changed the DPI to be at least 600, changed so the printer emulates worth laser and inkjet printing, but nothing seems to really work. I always get these washed out colors and smudged text. Have bought the wrong printer for the job or am I doing something wrong here?
(Link to the PDF since Reddit isn't allowing me to insert it into the post)
Note:
Did a test page to see if any of the settings were messing up the print but it came out super crisp. I think there is something wrong with either how I save the cards to the PDF or the cards themselves (feels unlikely since they look good right before printing, but I'm no expert).
