Epson printers and magenta colour cast

K
Posted By
Kakadu
Jun 20, 2004
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8255
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Interesting stuff all this curve technology and ICC or ICM profiles. Pretty neat circle of confusion surrounding the colour management of Photoshop too. Frankly I have never had much time for the methods described by many so called experts and my foray into a new printer only serves to reinforce those views.

I have this home grown theory about matching colours from scan-to-screen-to-print. Basically it goes along the lines of using known quality components and balancing the screen to look the way a final print does. If the screen ends up with a shocking colour cast, find what is wrong and the system comes into balance.

This worked fine right up to last Friday when I unpacked a new Epson R310 printer and begin a 2 day exercise in colour balance hell, to get it right. I thought I’d share my experience so other can benefit.

If you start with a system balanced out in the first place, you could stuff it all up trying to get a good print (as I did). I have been quite happy with the output from an Agfa lab I upload my photos to. I’ve been equally happy with the output from my Minolta Magicolor laser too. Following other people’s advise (including Epson themselves) broke the colour balance of all my gear and caused me to start over again.

What did I do the get it right?
Removed all profiles from the printer.
Turned off Colour management in Photoshop.
Using the Epson printer management, reduce magenta by 14 points Reduced yellow by 5 points
Changed the printer’s gamma to 1.5 and like magic, every thing is back in balance!

The prints I got from the lab just a while ago look the same as ones from my R310. The Magicolor output is as it always has been and my scanned images are easily adjusted to ‘look’ right on the screen and print the way the screen looks. My DSLR images, my wife’s digicam images all print and look the way they do on the screen and the screen looks ‘right’.

Technocrats might drool over the latest profiles and curves but all my photos look really good and all I ever do is make visual adjustments so they ‘look’ right on the screen and print the same on any device. Isn’t that what we all strive for?


Kakadu…
I thought I’d died and gone to Photographers heaven.
Kakadu National Park, Paradise Australian style.

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