Photoshop CS+Epson 1280 printer+paper calibrations

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Keith

Check out the very recent post about this and visit Ian Lyons site. If you want consistent reproducable colour, use PS color management.

Richard Davidson "Color Management with CS and Epson 1280" 2/4/04 5:16pm </cgi-bin/webx?13/3>

Use only papers designed for dye inks such as that used by the 1280. Preferably stick to Epson papers recommended for the 1280, they are designed for your printer and will give you the best results. If a third party paper offers printer profiles for your printer, then you may get adequate results, but there is no guarantee especially if the profiles are free (you sometimes get what you pay for).

Now on to color management. The ONLY way to achieve consistent results in digital printing is to use printer profiles for the paper/printer/ink combination in your workflow. That being said, you absolutely must start with some effort to calibrate your display (PC Monitor). You can use Adobe Gamma as a starting point but the best route to take is to use an instrument calibration method using a colorimeter or spectrophotometer. The former being somewhat affordable the latter being expensive to very expensive. Monaco and ColorVision offer excellent colorimeters and software to create monitor, scanner, and printer profiles, and all things considered, they are a bargain if you plan to do any measurable amount of printing at home.

Once you have a well calibrated monitor you can now begin to lay the foundation to consistent printing results. You will have to learn about how to apply ICC profiles to your images and select the correct options in you Epson print driver and I am afraid this is way too lengthy to post here. Ian Lyons web site is a good start. A good second resource is the printer forums at WWW.Nikonians.org. Search in the printer forum for posts by Bobj or BJNicholls. There is a wealth of information there.

In basic terms you are going to develop a print workflow where you edit your image in a known colorspace (sRGB,ADOBE RGB 1998, etc.) using an ICC printer profile (which maps the colors in your workspace to those that the printer can print). You then turn off all color management in your print driver and let the profile designate to the printer which color will represent which during the translation from monitor image to the print. In the middle somewhere in this process (before sending the file to the printer) you can use soft proofing which is a kind of virtual WYSIWYG. It is a feature in PS 7 and CS that will give you an on-screen preview of how the colors in your image are going to map out to the print taking into account the particular reflective properties of the paper you are using. You can then make adjustments to this soft proof until you are satisfied with the output without having to print a test print. Pretty cool, huh?

Anyway, please check out the links that I and others have provided. There is a lot of good information there. It is a learning process but you will gain a lot and lessen your frustration.