Epson R2400 First Experience

[drew]

Sorry, Irwin. I do not. This program, along with a few others I use everyday have removed any wishful thinking about switching platforms.

Drew

[DonLashier]

> ProPhoto is the space I choose when converting from raw; otherwise, there's been no profile conversion or assignment.

If you convert to prophoto make sure that this is also your working space in CS or any advantage will be immediately lost when loading into PS anyway. Also make sure that color management is turned on in CS with warnings to prevent any unexpected effects. But I doubt that this is the immediate problem. Unless your knowledge and experience is to the "picky" stage, I'd suggest just sticking with Adobe RGB for both conversion and working space.

Your eagle photo looks nearly perfectly exposed, but none the less will be a difficult image to print (unadjusted) because of the lighting. I'd pick a more conventional image for testing. The one you downloaded should work, or some other image of your own.

> When printed, the two darkest blocks on each of the three strips are not discernible. On each strip there appears to be quite a jump between the lightest two blocks.

Does sound like something's askew somewhere. I don't use a Mac so don't pay much attention but do recall issues with printing dark on epsons with OSX. The solution iirc was to remove the gimp drivers and re-install the epson driver. You might google this or if you're lucky maybe epson tech support will have a clue.

- DL

[Irwin_Poche]

I don't know what I was thinking when I said I didn't have any other programs to try. I do. I have iPhoto. It prints a slightly worse image than CS2 does. The overly dark areas are darker still than with CS2.

[Irwin_Poche]

>If you convert to prophoto make sure that this is also your working space in CS or any advantage will be immediately lost when loading into PS anyway. Also make sure that color management is turned on in CS with warnings to prevent any unexpected effects. But I doubt that this is the immediate problem. Unless your knowledge and experience is to the "picky" stage, I'd suggest just sticking with Adobe RGB for both conversion and working space.

If an image is rendered from raw as ProPhoto, the working space is something else, but I respond Yes to the "use embedded profile" question, then I don't believe anything is lost, yes ?

>Your eagle photo looks nearly perfectly exposed, but none the less will be a difficult image to print (unadjusted) because of the lighting. I'd pick a more conventional image for testing. The one you downloaded should work, or some other image of your own.

I do have some more recent stuff with more "normal" exposures that I'm going to try. The downloaded bridge image also darkens shadows, most noticeably in the faces of the machine in shadow.

> Does sound like something's askew somewhere. I don't use a Mac so don't pay much attention but do recall issues with printing dark on epsons with OSX. The solution iirc was to remove the gimp drivers and re-install the epson driver. You might google this or if you're lucky maybe epson tech support will have a clue.

I spent a couple of hours on the phone with Epson this morning. The two techs I spoke to sounded like they knew what they were doing but neither had heard of an Epson/Gimp conflict. The level two guy said such a thing is impossible but his absolute certainty just seems to make it more probable. Google found some references regarding this but no replies saying that issues had been solved. Also, they were over two years old so the issue may have been resolved. But if I get no further, that will be the next thing I try.

Epson concluded that the printer was functioning normally (no surprise) and that image manipulation (somewhere) was off. That's after lots of test prints of other things such as PS samples. Less of a darkening issue than with my image. My PS settings were exactly what they expected.

A call to ColorVision was more productive. When I told the tech that the two blackest blocks of my three grey scales were indiscernible and the the first non-pure-white block looked considerably darker than I thought it could have been he said they'd send me a new Spyder. That kind of problem is probably because one of the sensors in the colorimeter is out of alignment. He also said that this kind of issue isn't really apparent on a screen because all the profile data isn't used to render the screen image (8 vs 16 bit ?) but that PS uses the entire profile when printing. I should have a new Spyder early next week and I'll let you know how that goes.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel...

[DonLashier]

[ QUOTE ]
A call to ColorVision was more productive. When I told the tech that the two blackest blocks of my three grey scales were indiscernible and the the first non-pure-white block looked considerably darker than I thought it could have been he said they'd send me a new Spyder. That kind of problem is probably because one of the sensors in the colorimeter is out of alignment. He also said that this kind of issue isn't really apparent on a screen because all the profile data isn't used to render the screen image (8 vs 16 bit ?) but that PS uses the entire profile when printing. I should have a new Spyder early next week and I'll let you know how that goes.


[/ QUOTE ]

That doesn't make sense because the monitor profile should play no roll in printing, although a bad monitor profile could lead you to mis-adjust images.

AFA Gimp, it looks like the issue was resolved with Gutenprint 5.0 (Sept 05): [ QUOTE ]
* The default gamma for all Epson printers has been increased to resolve long-standing issues with overly dark prints. The user gamma adjustment is specified as a correction, so the default value of 1.0 will yield correct results.

[/ QUOTE ]

In any case you may or may not be using the Gimp/Gutenprint print driver.

- DL

[Irwin_Poche]

My frustration grows.

Every print driver on my system was removed and the Epson installer was rerun. Results are identical. There never was a Gimp driver for the R2400 so I don't see how it could have made any difference, but it was worth a shot.

I called Epson with this information to see if they had any ideas. The idea of printing grey scale blocks was totally alien to the tech I talked to - she no idea what I was talking about. She also says that there can't be anything physically wrong with the printer because I said that printing the Dune.tif sample image that comes with CS2 looked okay. The fact that is is shadowless doesn't matter. Epson doesn't care to look at any of the files I've printed even though they do have R2400's to test with. They don't want to even get a print out in the mail.

Also, using Epson's color management and going to the lowest possible gamma of 1.5 -or- changing the brightness to -14 (which is about half way down to the lowest possible setting) makes to difference at all to the printed image.

Since photos are subjective, sometime ago I quit using my own eagle image and, instead, I'm using grey scale bars. No mater what program I use or what fiddling I do in Epson's own color management, the bars are always identical. For the whitest block (255,255,255 in CS2) I can see a very slight application of ink. For the blackest (0,0,0) compared to either (18,18,18), (21,21,21), or (25,25,25) there is absolutely no difference on paper. All are jet black (but it is the best black I've ever seen from an ink jet.)

The eagle, btw, was not at all adjusted after raw conversion, not even the Auto check boxes.

The only option Epson gives me at this point is to install from scratch, a new OS on a different machine. Then plead my case to customer service.

Using grey scale bars seems to me to eliminate any chance of screen brightness and/or calibration being an issue. I'll see when the new Spyder2 arrives.

I'll see what happens when I dust off my old machine and reinstall a new OS on it. I think nothing will be different, but, as I said, I'm frustrated. We'll see what happens...

[WillThompson]

[ QUOTE ]
My frustration grows.

[/ QUOTE ]

I cheat when using my mac. I learned a long time ago that with my 22" cinema display gave Me just what you are mentioning so I set the brightness to 50% and now what I see is what I get.