The problems: It prints way too dark. It prints too much ink for plain paper.
I suspect that if I solve one, I'll solve both. I also suspect it would be fine on heavy paper (photo or matte).
My printer is physically connected to a windows machine, by USB.
It is shared (standard windows networking).
Connecting it to my Mac installs it as Gutenprint v5.1.3
Downloading and installing the Epson driver directly from Epson did not change this (and they recommend not using the gutenprint driver).
I have calibrated my display -- things look good on screen.
The file in question is ICC tagged -- so my screen settings shouldn't matter.
I do not have photoshop, I'm printing from Preview.
The only "screen display flaw" is that the two leftmost Kodak color patches -- "blue" and "cyan" look "purple" and "blue" on my screen.
I have tried the following changes to the print settings:
1. Print scaling to 25%, Landscape mode (so it will fit on a page).
2. Color matching: Specifying an ICC profile.
I have tried both the "SP2200 Standard_PK" that came with the driver, and several of the 1440 premium ICC's that are supposed to do better. The 1440's all gave visible color casts on the grays in the 127-200 range. All cases printed too dark to distinguish the 0 black from the 18 black. The standard printed too dark to see the teeth of the gears in the upper left; the 1440's print (barely) light enough to see the teeth. They are clear and easily visible on screen, as well as the rust color on the left gear. This corner is my "test case" corner.
In printer features, I specify the following:
General 1: Plain paper, 360 DPI, standard quality.
General 2: Crop (size is already set, and I don't want resizing to alter colors).
Printer features common: Photo black ink. (we're out of Matte ink)
Printer features extra 3: Seven color photo
Printer features extra 5: Adjust dot size: I've tried both "yes" and "no". Didn't help.
Output common 2: Image type: I've used "Photograph" and "Manual control". Didn't help.
Output extra 1 2: Color correction has been both "Default" and "Uncorrected".
My printouts are duplicating the purple/blue of the blue/cyan patches, and I would not be surprised to find that the color patches really are that way.
(Incidentally, does anyone know where you specify "Perceptual" or "Relative Colorimetric" for profile conversion? I could not find that anywhere.)
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The PhotoDisc target (PDI target) is one of the images I use to evaluate new printers, actually. I like that target. My recollection is that the 2200 is reasonably well tuned.
If it's printing too dark, there could be two problems:
* The density could be too high. In this case, just change the Density setting -- see if 0.9 or 0.8 do any better. There are a lot of different kinds of plain paper.
* The gamma could be too low. Try changing the gamma to 1.1 or 1.2.
You will not get good results using ICC profiles with Gutenprint unless you use ICC profiles specifically designed for Gutenprint -- you're likely to get color shifts. Unless you have a profile specifically created against Gutenprint, I would just use a straight sRGB profile with the default color correction. If you want to create a profile, I suggest using Uncorrected color correction. This will yield very dark, somewhat purple blues and very dark greens, but a profile can correct that. The default color correction does hue and darkness corrections that may interfere with profiling.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
In Output Controls Extra 1, two pages, I see separate adjusts for density for each of the 3 inks, and black, but they all say "None", not "1.00". There is another density that just says "Density", and goes up to 8; the others go up to 2. I do not know what the scale is, or what "Normal" is.
By "Gamma", do you mean "Composite Gamma" on Output controls extra 2 1? That's the only gamma I see.
I also found a "Brightness" on Output Control Common 1
Trying Brightness 2: Ohh, only the darkest areas print at all.
Brightness 1.3: Not bad. The dark areas are light enough, but the colors (the color checker chart on the left; the 5 pointed metal thing behind the chains) are faint/pastel.
Hmm...
Actually, holding the page up to the monitor, and going over things with the ink next to the screen, it matches really, REALLY closely. The biggest difference seems to just be the "backlit" nature of the display. The red patch in the color checker (3rd row, 3rd column) is the only spot that is really far off; the dark-skin baby is just a little dark, as is the 18 black patch.
Brightness 1.4 ... just a little too light -- the kodak paper checker right three columns (the orange checkerboard) is too faint. The dime seems to have lost its shine (the metal is faint). Everything else looks fine.
Looks like it's fine adjusting of brightness at this point. Hey, at 1.375 the red patch matches.
Aha! I know how to describe it. The light colors, the "highlights" of an object, like the shine of the dime, or gray back-plate of the right toothed gear needs to be a little lighter (either less ink, or the lighter shade of ink), and the 18-black is a little too dark, but everything else is just about "perfect" -- I hold the paper up to the screen, and the colors match spot for spot, but the overall look is fainter (not enough ink -- not enough color) and darker (not enough light -- but adding ink removes light).
Maybe I just need a brighter room light to look at it in.
Hmm. How can I lighten the darks (less black), and the highlights next to the dark colors, and at the same time darken the light colors (kodak chart, yellow glow from lamp) without altering the mid-colors (the Gretag chart)
===
The gray scale at the bottom is still a problem, but I'm wondering if this is more of an ink issue than the driver -- I'm seeing definite "banding" effects from the head passes printing differently as it goes left or right at the "dark end" of the page.
===
Brightness seems to be mostly solving this issue.
What is the effect/scale/ "normal" setting for the ink densities (0-2) and the "Density" (0-8)?
What does "Composite Gamma" do, and on that same page, there's settings for each color, and then a balance for each color.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Ok, playing with things a bit: Changing Density from "None" to ".5" gives almost identical results.
===
On the Mac, everything is color managed. When printing, some color space for the printer needs to be identified for the printing system. When printing photos, or other things, the gutenprint driver will try to adjust it to print better.
So the question is, what color space is the driver assuming when it tries to adjust things to look better? While I get pretty darn good results on the standard 2200 profile on plain paper, that won't hold on other papers or higher DPI; what does the driver assume when it is doing it's smarts?
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
BTW, Gutenprint 5.1.3 is quite old and was never intended to be a generally available release; it was a development build. We've recently released 5.2.4, which has a number of fixes and improvements.
I don't expect a lot of change to the output, but you may find that the Density control works correctly.
The master Density control affects the total amount of ink used. The default ("None") setting of this control is equivalent to 1.0.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
The installer logs shows the old stuff being removed. Not only is the printing system 5.1.3, unchanged since the CD was pressed, but there's traces of 5.0.0-beta in there as well that go poof from the uninstall.
And, the documentation for 5.2 is very clear on this:
1. Start with density if the ink is printing too dark. Do not use brightness to try to alter the dark grey/blacks.
In other words, use density to fix the black level of the printout, then use the various gamma/etc controls to adjust the midpoints and highlights. Just like adjusting a monitor -- blackpoint, midtones, whitepoint.
> Note that the black gamma value is not used when printing in color.
Yea, trying to use the black gamma to lighten the print just didn't work :-).
> The GCR Transition Value serves as a gamma value for the black channel
Equally odd:
> Many options offer a value of “None” in addition to the numeric valued options. A value of “None” allows Gutenprint to select an appropriate value based on the other options; it is not the same thing as a specific numeric value.
So, the first step is finding a density that makes 0, 18, and 36 grays all distinct.
Put everything else back to default, and just play with that.
Wow. Even at .4, 18 still looks like 0. 0.3 looks good. Even more interesting, looking at the Kodak color scales, it looks like only the light colors and yellow need intensifying.
Next, lets try the gamma controls. (There's a bunch of per-light-color controls in output control extra 5, which now has 16 sub-pages. There's Value, Transition, and Density scale. Density is "obvious" by now, and prints more or less of that color. Transition affects where the switch between dark and light occurs. And Value, zero to one, means ... ah! How much lighter the light is.
Only problem: Yellow is affected the same as cyan and magenta. There is no value for yellow. So it's probably just a gamma adjust.)
Density 0.3, gamma 0.7: Wow. That's really close. I want to lighten things up just a little in the dark areas, so lets try density 0.280, gamma 0.7:
Ok, the Gretag chart is too light (not enough ink), the cyan patches (top right and third down, right) look bad (the first is inside sRGB, so that should look good) -- again, too light. But the dark colors on the Kodak chart (first four columns) are too dark -- looking back at that first (0.3, 1.0), they were still too dark there. So 0.28 isn't light enough in the dark region.
Try 0.250, 0.8: Ah, foo. Gamma needs to go down (0.6), not up (0.8).
More playing around tomorrow. But this is definitely the way to go.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I have density of 0.25, gamma of 0.5, I'm printing at 20% scaling (comes out the same size as 25% on-screen; seems to be the best match/sharpness/focus for 300 DPI image and 360 DPI printer).
I have everything else as default, or photograph.
The manual says that GCR transition on output control extra 5 15 is supposed to act as the black gamma, but "None" and "0.800" produce identical looking output.
The issues:
Looking at the kodak color chart, columns 1-4 (darks), and 9-12 (lights) look good. But columns 5-8 (midtones), and the first three rows (colors) of the Gretag chart are too light/faint/pale; even the greyscale could use a little more ink.
The colors seem ok. It's the midtones that look like they need more ink. But just adding ink (raising the density) makes 18 gray and 0 black look identical, and makes the lights too dark.
So the first question is: How do I make the midtones denser (more ink of the same color), not darker (more black). Can I do this on plain paper, or do I have to use matte/photo paper for that?
Second: The 2nd and 4th baby (the light-skin ones) are too dark/brownish on printing; they do not look pinkish at all (they do on screen). Is my screen off, or are they supposed to look like that.
Third: Everyone I've asked says that the "blue" on the Kodak color patches is purple. Is that a known issue with the Kodak patches, or is this really way off?
Screen was calibrated with SuperCal 1.1.4, which seems to do a good job of letting me get the whole spectrum -- even the darks -- well calibrated.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Making the midtones deeper without changing the black point -- try reducing the Composite Gamma setting.
The two kids -- they looked reasonably accurate on my screen, but that may differ from yours.
The GCR transition controls the gamma of the replacement of CMY by K, to be more specific. Setting it to "None" means to use the default value for the printer and paper. For most paper types on that printer, the default is 1.0. Setting it lower will use less black ink and more composite in lighter and midtone areas.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I have Mac OS 10.5.7.
I am trying to print to an Epson color photo 2200.
The test image I'm printing is the GettyImages's photodisk, as fetched from http://www.gballard.net/dl/PDI_TargetFolderONLY.zip
Referral page http://www.gballard.net/psd/srgbforwww.html
The problems: It prints way too dark. It prints too much ink for plain paper.
I suspect that if I solve one, I'll solve both. I also suspect it would be fine on heavy paper (photo or matte).
My printer is physically connected to a windows machine, by USB.
It is shared (standard windows networking).
Connecting it to my Mac installs it as Gutenprint v5.1.3
Downloading and installing the Epson driver directly from Epson did not change this (and they recommend not using the gutenprint driver).
I have calibrated my display -- things look good on screen.
The file in question is ICC tagged -- so my screen settings shouldn't matter.
I do not have photoshop, I'm printing from Preview.
The only "screen display flaw" is that the two leftmost Kodak color patches -- "blue" and "cyan" look "purple" and "blue" on my screen.
I have tried the following changes to the print settings:
1. Print scaling to 25%, Landscape mode (so it will fit on a page).
2. Color matching: Specifying an ICC profile.
I have tried both the "SP2200 Standard_PK" that came with the driver, and several of the 1440 premium ICC's that are supposed to do better. The 1440's all gave visible color casts on the grays in the 127-200 range. All cases printed too dark to distinguish the 0 black from the 18 black. The standard printed too dark to see the teeth of the gears in the upper left; the 1440's print (barely) light enough to see the teeth. They are clear and easily visible on screen, as well as the rust color on the left gear. This corner is my "test case" corner.
In printer features, I specify the following:
General 1: Plain paper, 360 DPI, standard quality.
General 2: Crop (size is already set, and I don't want resizing to alter colors).
Printer features common: Photo black ink. (we're out of Matte ink)
Printer features extra 3: Seven color photo
Printer features extra 5: Adjust dot size: I've tried both "yes" and "no". Didn't help.
Output common 2: Image type: I've used "Photograph" and "Manual control". Didn't help.
Output extra 1 2: Color correction has been both "Default" and "Uncorrected".
My printouts are duplicating the purple/blue of the blue/cyan patches, and I would not be surprised to find that the color patches really are that way.
(Incidentally, does anyone know where you specify "Perceptual" or "Relative Colorimetric" for profile conversion? I could not find that anywhere.)
The PhotoDisc target (PDI target) is one of the images I use to evaluate new printers, actually. I like that target. My recollection is that the 2200 is reasonably well tuned.
If it's printing too dark, there could be two problems:
* The density could be too high. In this case, just change the Density setting -- see if 0.9 or 0.8 do any better. There are a lot of different kinds of plain paper.
* The gamma could be too low. Try changing the gamma to 1.1 or 1.2.
You will not get good results using ICC profiles with Gutenprint unless you use ICC profiles specifically designed for Gutenprint -- you're likely to get color shifts. Unless you have a profile specifically created against Gutenprint, I would just use a straight sRGB profile with the default color correction. If you want to create a profile, I suggest using Uncorrected color correction. This will yield very dark, somewhat purple blues and very dark greens, but a profile can correct that. The default color correction does hue and darkness corrections that may interfere with profiling.
How do I adjust density?
In Output Controls Extra 1, two pages, I see separate adjusts for density for each of the 3 inks, and black, but they all say "None", not "1.00". There is another density that just says "Density", and goes up to 8; the others go up to 2. I do not know what the scale is, or what "Normal" is.
By "Gamma", do you mean "Composite Gamma" on Output controls extra 2 1? That's the only gamma I see.
I also found a "Brightness" on Output Control Common 1
Trying Brightness 2: Ohh, only the darkest areas print at all.
Brightness 1.3: Not bad. The dark areas are light enough, but the colors (the color checker chart on the left; the 5 pointed metal thing behind the chains) are faint/pastel.
Hmm...
Actually, holding the page up to the monitor, and going over things with the ink next to the screen, it matches really, REALLY closely. The biggest difference seems to just be the "backlit" nature of the display. The red patch in the color checker (3rd row, 3rd column) is the only spot that is really far off; the dark-skin baby is just a little dark, as is the 18 black patch.
Brightness 1.4 ... just a little too light -- the kodak paper checker right three columns (the orange checkerboard) is too faint. The dime seems to have lost its shine (the metal is faint). Everything else looks fine.
Looks like it's fine adjusting of brightness at this point. Hey, at 1.375 the red patch matches.
Aha! I know how to describe it. The light colors, the "highlights" of an object, like the shine of the dime, or gray back-plate of the right toothed gear needs to be a little lighter (either less ink, or the lighter shade of ink), and the 18-black is a little too dark, but everything else is just about "perfect" -- I hold the paper up to the screen, and the colors match spot for spot, but the overall look is fainter (not enough ink -- not enough color) and darker (not enough light -- but adding ink removes light).
Maybe I just need a brighter room light to look at it in.
Hmm. How can I lighten the darks (less black), and the highlights next to the dark colors, and at the same time darken the light colors (kodak chart, yellow glow from lamp) without altering the mid-colors (the Gretag chart)
===
The gray scale at the bottom is still a problem, but I'm wondering if this is more of an ink issue than the driver -- I'm seeing definite "banding" effects from the head passes printing differently as it goes left or right at the "dark end" of the page.
===
Brightness seems to be mostly solving this issue.
What is the effect/scale/ "normal" setting for the ink densities (0-2) and the "Density" (0-8)?
What does "Composite Gamma" do, and on that same page, there's settings for each color, and then a balance for each color.
Ok, playing with things a bit: Changing Density from "None" to ".5" gives almost identical results.
===
On the Mac, everything is color managed. When printing, some color space for the printer needs to be identified for the printing system. When printing photos, or other things, the gutenprint driver will try to adjust it to print better.
So the question is, what color space is the driver assuming when it tries to adjust things to look better? While I get pretty darn good results on the standard 2200 profile on plain paper, that won't hold on other papers or higher DPI; what does the driver assume when it is doing it's smarts?
I would recommend using just an sRGB profile, unless you get one made for your particular combination of resolution and paper type using Gutenprint.
The "standard" 2200 profile is presumably made against Epson's driver; Gutenprint's output likely differs considerably.
BTW, Gutenprint 5.1.3 is quite old and was never intended to be a generally available release; it was a development build. We've recently released 5.2.4, which has a number of fixes and improvements.
I don't expect a lot of change to the output, but you may find that the Density control works correctly.
The master Density control affects the total amount of ink used. The default ("None") setting of this control is equivalent to 1.0.
So I got 5.2.4, and installed it.
The installer logs shows the old stuff being removed. Not only is the printing system 5.1.3, unchanged since the CD was pressed, but there's traces of 5.0.0-beta in there as well that go poof from the uninstall.
And, the documentation for 5.2 is very clear on this:
1. Start with density if the ink is printing too dark. Do not use brightness to try to alter the dark grey/blacks.
In other words, use density to fix the black level of the printout, then use the various gamma/etc controls to adjust the midpoints and highlights. Just like adjusting a monitor -- blackpoint, midtones, whitepoint.
> Note that the black gamma value is not used when printing in color.
Yea, trying to use the black gamma to lighten the print just didn't work :-).
> The GCR Transition Value serves as a gamma value for the black channel
Equally odd:
> Many options offer a value of “None” in addition to the numeric valued options. A value of “None” allows Gutenprint to select an appropriate value based on the other options; it is not the same thing as a specific numeric value.
So, the first step is finding a density that makes 0, 18, and 36 grays all distinct.
Put everything else back to default, and just play with that.
Wow. Even at .4, 18 still looks like 0. 0.3 looks good. Even more interesting, looking at the Kodak color scales, it looks like only the light colors and yellow need intensifying.
Next, lets try the gamma controls. (There's a bunch of per-light-color controls in output control extra 5, which now has 16 sub-pages. There's Value, Transition, and Density scale. Density is "obvious" by now, and prints more or less of that color. Transition affects where the switch between dark and light occurs. And Value, zero to one, means ... ah! How much lighter the light is.
Only problem: Yellow is affected the same as cyan and magenta. There is no value for yellow. So it's probably just a gamma adjust.)
Density 0.3, gamma 0.7: Wow. That's really close. I want to lighten things up just a little in the dark areas, so lets try density 0.280, gamma 0.7:
Ok, the Gretag chart is too light (not enough ink), the cyan patches (top right and third down, right) look bad (the first is inside sRGB, so that should look good) -- again, too light. But the dark colors on the Kodak chart (first four columns) are too dark -- looking back at that first (0.3, 1.0), they were still too dark there. So 0.28 isn't light enough in the dark region.
Try 0.250, 0.8: Ah, foo. Gamma needs to go down (0.6), not up (0.8).
More playing around tomorrow. But this is definitely the way to go.
Ok, I need some advice.
I have density of 0.25, gamma of 0.5, I'm printing at 20% scaling (comes out the same size as 25% on-screen; seems to be the best match/sharpness/focus for 300 DPI image and 360 DPI printer).
I have everything else as default, or photograph.
The manual says that GCR transition on output control extra 5 15 is supposed to act as the black gamma, but "None" and "0.800" produce identical looking output.
The issues:
Looking at the kodak color chart, columns 1-4 (darks), and 9-12 (lights) look good. But columns 5-8 (midtones), and the first three rows (colors) of the Gretag chart are too light/faint/pale; even the greyscale could use a little more ink.
The colors seem ok. It's the midtones that look like they need more ink. But just adding ink (raising the density) makes 18 gray and 0 black look identical, and makes the lights too dark.
So the first question is: How do I make the midtones denser (more ink of the same color), not darker (more black). Can I do this on plain paper, or do I have to use matte/photo paper for that?
Second: The 2nd and 4th baby (the light-skin ones) are too dark/brownish on printing; they do not look pinkish at all (they do on screen). Is my screen off, or are they supposed to look like that.
Third: Everyone I've asked says that the "blue" on the Kodak color patches is purple. Is that a known issue with the Kodak patches, or is this really way off?
Screen was calibrated with SuperCal 1.1.4, which seems to do a good job of letting me get the whole spectrum -- even the darks -- well calibrated.
Making the midtones deeper without changing the black point -- try reducing the Composite Gamma setting.
The two kids -- they looked reasonably accurate on my screen, but that may differ from yours.
The GCR transition controls the gamma of the replacement of CMY by K, to be more specific. Setting it to "None" means to use the default value for the printer and paper. For most paper types on that printer, the default is 1.0. Setting it lower will use less black ink and more composite in lighter and midtone areas.