2010-Jan 7:: Bob Sullivan to PDML > I've always had difficulties with colors in printing on my old Epson 870 > photo printer. I don't do it very often, and learned how to 'get along' with > Photoshop Elements for prints. Now I would like to make my new system easier > and more foolproof. I've calibrated the monitor, but was very disappointed > printing out of Lightroom. The steel gray minivan I photographed showed up > like it was under a heatlamp. I had a red or magenta cast on a photo taken in > sunlight. Not at all close to the original. > > The Epson 870 might be 5 years old? Resolution is satisfactory, but colors > wander. Depending on what glossy photo paper I put in the printer, I get > different cast & shades. HP & Epson glossy papers are not the answer and I > have a bunch generic glossy paper from Staples (because the first 50 sheets I > bought from them worked out so well). > > I hear you guys talk about selecting a paper profile from the printer and I'm > jealous. I don't have any profiles to select from and I suspect the printer > is too old. I've recently looked into creating some profiles, but thought I'd > ask for your collective wisdom. > > Regards, Bob S.
Hi Bob, The goal of a color managed workflow is that what you see on the screen can be matched through the use of display calibration and profiling across systems and out to printers, utilizing paper profiles. The Epson Photo 870 was the 'narrow' carriage variant of the Epson Photo 1270 (I still own one of those..). On Mac OS X, and on Windows too I imagine, the paper profiles for a range of standard papers are installed with the driver package. Additional paper profiles are available from the Epson website as well as from third party paper vendors and paper manufacturers (Atlex, InkjetArt, Hahnemühle, Ilford, Harman, etc). How many varieties of paper profiles are available is hard to say ... I haven't looked too hard. But the absolutely important thing to realize is that the color management system is *critical* on specifically what printer and printer settings, what inks and what paper you are using in conjunction with the paper profiles. One you understand that, you will see that it is important that you follow a rigorous set of setup steps to get exactly the right settings for your printing use. Once you do that, printing with high fidelity from the screen becomes pretty easy and very consistent. If you substitute third party inks or alternative papers, no matter how similar they might appear to the Epson inks and whatever reference paper you want to choose, color management fails. So ... hardware config: - Calibrate and profile your monitor. For a Windows system, it is probably best to choose targets like 110 cd/mm^2 Luminance, 2.2 gamma, white point 6500K. (My targets on Mac OS X are 110 L, 1.8 gamma, 5500K white point.) Be sure the monitor profile generated by this calibration and profiling step is installed and chosed by the OS preference set up. - Be sure your Epson 870 printer driver is up to date and the full Epson package for the printer is installed for your OS version. Be sure that you're using original Epson ink cartridges in the printer and that the heads are clean. Be sure you're using Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper as a reference starting point. Now you can go into Lightroom and start working. Lightroom takes no application setup for the working colorspace, it's automatic: it always promotes all operations to 16bits per channel and uses a ProPhoto RGB gamma 2.2 colorspace. Presuming that you've imported and adjusted a photo to be exactly the way you want to print it, click on it in the grid and go to the Print module. 1- In the Template Browser, click on the Lightroom template to Maximize Size. This is a starting point. note: Mac OS X and Windows vary a little in how they present the printer settings. Mac OS X has traditionally used the notion of two settings phases, the Page Setup and the Printer Settings, where Windows has traditionally combined them. Both are continuing to change, so read the next two steps and interpret them for your specific OS/printer interfaces. I write them as Mac OS X v10.5.6 instructions, but the concepts are similar on all versions of both OSes. 2a- Lower left corner, click on the Page Setup button. Here you will choose your printer, choose the paper size and feed type as well as the paper orientation. Click OK. 2b- Lower left corner, click on the Print Settings button. This brings up the printer drivers' interface. In my version of the driver, I pick first "Print Settings" from the popup menu. I set media type: Premium Glossy Photo Paper mode: advanced settings print quality: Photo-1440 dpi halftoning: High Quality halftoning Then I pick "Color Management" from the popup menu. I set No Color Adjustment Now click the "Save" button. What this has done is to record the printer driver's settings for Lightroom, organizing which printer queue, which paper size and orientation, what media type and print quality settings are to be use. The choice of "No Color Management" means that Lightroom is going to do all the preparation of the image data and send it to the driver as a finished bit stream which the driver will not change any further ... the driver will simply output it to the printer as it comes from Lightroom. Next, go to the right hand section of the Lightroom Print module. Starting with "Image Settings" and working your way down the panels, set up exactly how you want the print to appear on the paper. It's fairly self-explanatory. Note that the Guides panel allows you to optionally display information about the printing dimensions so you can turn these items on when setting up the Image Settings and Layout to get things where you want them to be dimensionally and then turn them off to evaluate the actual paper appearance WYSIWYG style. Once you get to "Print Job" there's some more work to do... 3- In the Print Job panel, first be sure the topmost setting "Print To:" is set to Printer. 4- The default for the bottom setting, Color Management, is Profile: "Managed by Printer". This needs to be changed. Managed by Printer is a popup menu, click on it and choose "Other". You will be presented with a dialog showing the available paper profiles installed in your system. Check the ones for the Epson 870 and click OK. Now click on the popup menu again and choose the one for the "Epson Style Photo 870 Premium Glossy Photo Paper". 4a- Set the rendering intent to Perceptual. This is the best choice for the majority of cases. The other choice (Relative for relative colormetric) is occasionally useful for when you have fairly pathological images with a lot of color gamut boundary cases. The differences between them, for most average scenes, is imperceptible. 5- I normally let the Print Resolution float, but if you want you can set it to a specific output resolution. The reason to lock it to a specific resolution is if you're printing to small sizes ... Epson printers image best when sent an image file at between 240 and 360 ppi, so if the output resolution is going to go up higher than that, I restrict it to that range. 6- Turn on Print Sharpening and set it to Standard. Lightroom does size/density adaptive output sharpening in three levels ... the only way to know for sure what works best with a given image at a given size on a specific paper is to actually print all three, but Standard does the right job 90% of the time. 6a- Set the media type to Glossy (for this glossy paper reference description). NOW, before you press the Print One button ... 7- Choose the Print menu, New Template command. Name the new template "Epson 870 - Premium Glossy" and maybe add a size description. Click the Create button. This will by default put a new print module template in the User Templates area. Lightroom will save in this template all of the printing setup instructions you made above. In the future, when you want to print photos to this paper with this printer of this size, all you have to do is select them, go to the Print module, and click on this template. All your setup work will be applied to whatever set of images you want to print. 8- Click the Print One button. What comes out the printer, presuming you've made all the settings as described properly and presuming that your printer and profile are working correctly, should be an excellent match to what you see on screen. --- Hope that helps. ... On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 5:47 AM, Bob Sullivan <rf.sulli...@gmail.com> wrote: > I've always had difficulties with colors in printing on my old Epson > 870 photo printer. > I don't do it very often, and learned how to 'get along' with > Photoshop Elements for prints. > Now I would like to make my new system easier and more foolproof. > I've calibrated the monitor, but was very disappointed printing out of > Lightroom. > The steel gray minivan I photographed showed up like it was under a heatlamp. > I had a red or magenta cast on a photo taken in sunlight. Not at all > close to the original. > > The Epson 870 might be 5 years old? Resolution is satisfactory, but > colors wander. > Depending on what glossy photo paper I put in the printer, I get > different cast & shades. > HP & Epson glossy papers are not the answer and I have a bunch generic > glossy paper > from Staples (because the first 50 sheets I bought from them worked > out so well). > > I hear you guys talk about selecting a paper profile from the printer > and I'm jealous. > I don't have any profiles to select from and I suspect the printer is too old. > I've recently looked into creating some profiles, but thought I'd ask > for your collective wisdom. > > Regards, Bob S. > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > PDML@pdml.net > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. > -- Godfrey godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
