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by pdschu on Sun May 14, 2017 4:28 pm
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I am using Epson 2880 and 3880 printers to print photos and cards. I use a NEC PA 271W monitor which is calibrated with the Spectraview II software and puck. I have used this for several years with good color rendering on the printers until recently. I did have to do something per NEC a few months ago to reset the light in order to re calibrate the screen. Other than that no known changes. When I print I always use the .icc profiles for the paper used. I have noticed that both PS and Lightroom are both giving inaccurate color printing.

Can you think of anything to check or adjust that might correct the problem. I could if necessary calibrate the printers with a colormunki or similar, but just not sure why this is happening.

Another unrelated question is why is the Epson print preview always so grossly over saturated and has no relation to what is printed? This has always been like this even when color printing was accurate.

Thanks.
Paul Schumacher
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by E.J. Peiker on Sun May 14, 2017 6:20 pm
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Hi Paul, Without posting your print driver screen shots for doing the prints, it's almost impossible to diagnose.
 

by pdschu on Sun May 14, 2017 6:49 pm
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Do you mean the settings on the printer dialog for PS or LR? I can post screen shots of these if this is what you mean.
I did leave out one fact which I DO have the settings for PS to manage the colors and the printer color settings turned off.
Paul Schumacher
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by Trev on Sun May 14, 2017 7:40 pm
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Apparently Epson print preview must always be unchecked when printing with profiles otherwise it can effect the end result. Whether that's causing some issues I'm not sure.
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by Royce Howland on Sun May 14, 2017 8:41 pm
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The Epson print preview screen is not colour managed. None of the Epson driver preview windows has ever shown accurate colours, especially on a wide gamut display. Ignore them except for the purposes of verifying you printed the image in the expected orientation with roughly proper margins, etc.

As to why images are now printing without a good screen match, as E.J. noted it's hard to say without a ton of specific info about settings and such, to diagnose where the problem may have come in. If literally the only change made was to the monitor, that has no impact on printing. The only thing it could impact is if you post-process new images never before printed, and the monitor was showing inaccurate colour causing you to process the files wrong, leading to mismatching prints. You can easily test for this by printing any file you've previously printed, and see if it matches what you expect the print to look like. If it does, then nothing in the print pipeline has changed. If the new print looks wrong, however, then something else has changed besides the display configuration.

Also you don't say what kind of computer / operating system you're printing from. If it's Mac OS X, then there have been numerous highly publicized (and other less known) problems where one of the vendors (usually Apple, but occasionally Adobe or Epson) breaks the colour managed printing pipeline in some way. Even if all your application settings look correct you may have a printer driver or operating system issue going on. So we may need info about that as well, if the app settings appear to be okay...
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by Royce Howland on Sun May 14, 2017 8:47 pm
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Also, if the print problem is affecting both printers the same, I'm going to assume for now that it's nothing to do with the printer hardware or ink. But feel free to clarify if that assumption isn't right... i.e. if one printer is essentially accurate, or much less inaccurate than the other, for example.
Royce Howland


Last edited by Royce Howland on Sun May 14, 2017 11:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 

by pdschu on Sun May 14, 2017 10:51 pm
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Thanks for the help! I am using a PC with Win 10 with latest updates.
I will do a check tomorrow between both printers, and look for something I have previously printed to compare.
Image
Paul Schumacher
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by E.J. Peiker on Mon May 15, 2017 12:55 pm
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The one thing I see as a person that occasionally uses that same paper (Red River Polar Matte) on the same printer is that this isn't presentation matte paper, I always use the Enhanced Matte Paper setting for this combinatiuon
 

by pdschu on Mon May 15, 2017 5:41 pm
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Thanks again for the input!

I printed a color chart on Epson Premium Presentation Matte paper using both the 2880 and the 3880 printers and printed both from LR and PS. I have to admit I do not see any significant difference except that the 2880 prints a very slight bit more intense color but no shift. No difference in LR and PS.
I also reprinted an image that I had from 2016 using the same printer and settings and once again There seems to be no significant differences.
The printed color charts do not match the onscreen charts although they seem closer when soft proofing. Maybe I need to do more of this in the future.

Any other suggestions?

If I were to color calibrate the printers with something like Colormunki or Silverfast, would this really solve the problem? Are there any specific settings I should make to Spectraview II when calibrating the monitor? I do use the 90 cd brightness on the screen so dark photos are not a problem.

Grateful for all advice.
Paul Schumacher
Schumacher Photography
 

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