I’m gonna print a picture to send away as a worksample to a school Im applying to. My first test print came out VERY dark compared to the result when displayed on my screen. Printing is done at home, and I’m not quite sure what I’m doing.
Software used is Maya 2011, MentalRay for rendering, Photoshop CS5 for comp’ing, and my printer is a common home printer, nothing fancy there.
From what I’ve gathered, the printed result gets better (i.e. what you see on the screen is what you get on the print) if I convert the picture to CMYK as a last step before printing, rather than printing directly from RGB.
Secondly, do I need to do some kind of gamma correction, in my render, or in Photoshop when comping, to combat the heavy darkness in my picture, or will the conversion from RGB to CMYK do the trick on its own?
If gamma correction is needed, what’s the best way of doing this? In render or in comp? I still have a day to spend on this, so if I need to re-render my picture (3 hour rendering all the layers) its not the end of the world, but of course the faster option is preferable 
prays for quick answers