Rendering Intent - Relative Colorimetric

On my Epson R1900 using my Windows 7 64 bit machine I've made enough prints using my standard material (Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper) in 8.3 X rolls to know that my prints (Panoramas - of course) were coming very accurately until two days ago. I've been using Relative Colorimetric as my Rendering Intent until this happened. Today I tried it again and the same thing happened: Super-saturated color!! I realize the preview shows unrealistic colors - always has - but until now the actual printing has been flawless. So, to make a long story short, this afternoon, after having seen the super saturated colors, I tried the same print using Perceptual instead of Relative Colorimetric and the print came out just fine. Can someone give me a clue as to what's going on?

Here are a couple of screen shots of my settings:
Mike Stolting

Mike, I can't read the 2nd screen shot showing the Photoshop print panel. Can you post that dialog on its own? Meanwhile, unless the printer ICC profile has become corrupted, I don't see how using a Relative Colorimetric rendering intent would cause super-saturated colors. It seems that something else is going on, not just a change from RC -> Perceptual. Could be corrupted printer driver configuration or something else like that. But I'd like to double-check the PS print dialog settings...

Royce,

Sorry about the small image. Here's a larger shot: I just can't understand it. I'm too tired tonight but tomorrow I'll experiment with some sheet media instead of wasting roll paper and see if the same thing happens.

Mike

I can't on the surface see anything wrong although I would turn off high speed just to be sure nothing gets smudged. Have you run a nozzle check?

I don't see anything there that could do it either. I had a similar issue on an old 2400 and I reloaded the driver and it fixed it. My guess is something went wonky (I think that is a technical computer term isn't it Royce?) in the driver. Reloading the driver certainly won't hurt anything. Let us know how it comes out.

Yeah, all your settings look fine. My best guess is the driver has gotten wonkified (Les hit the right technical term ). To try to resolve that I'd delete the printer, reinstall the driver (upgrade it, too, if you're not running the latest version for your operating system), and then add the printer back.

Thanks for the input guys. If it happens again I'll reinstall the driver. I haven't run a nozzle check lately but will do so today although I doubt that's the problem.

Again, thanks to you all for your interest. I'll report back on this problem in the near future to update its status.

Mike Stolting

Well, no problems today. I printed several images on my favorite media using relative colorimetric as the rendering intent and they came out just fine.

I'll update down the road should it happen again.

Mike Stolting

Any chance you accidentally printed on the wrong side of the paper?

E.J. Peiker wrote:Any chance you accidentally printed on the wrong side of the paper?

A mistake I've made a few times. Sometimes it is hard to tell which side is which.

Yeah, that's something I've done a time or two as well and it produces some ugly results.

LOL, no, I didn't print on the wrong side! (I've done that though in the distant past and could do it again).

Today I attempted to print an 8.3" x 43.2" pano. Same thing happened. I stopped the printing in time to only lose about 9'' of my roll. I was going to use perceptual rendering intent but decided to keep it as relative colorimetric and do what E.J. had suggested - turn off fast speed - and lo and behold it's printing my pano correctly as I type this. It still doesn't make sense.

Oh, in addition to changing the printing speed, in the Printing Preferences window, I unchecked the "Off (No Color Adjustment)" box and checked the "show all profiles" box just to see what was there. It was "EPSON Standard". I changed it to the proper icc profile (SPR1900 PmGlsy BstPhoto.icc). I don't think that would have mattered though since I went back of course to check the "Off (No Color Adjustment)" box before I printed.

So I'm of the opinion that when I do roll paper printing I need to a) turn off high speed and b) double check the printer profile in the preferences window? All seems crazy to me! I'll probably just use perceptual when I do roll paper from now on. I don't think there's much difference.

Mike Stolting

Depending on your content there may or may not be a difference between the two:

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutori ... ersion.htm