Epson Artisan 1430 Printing Mode

[david_benyukhis]

Dear community. My photo to be printed with PhotoShop on Epson Artisan 1430 Printer has RGB mode. Do I need change this mode to CMYK? I use ICM Color Management of Epson Artisan 1430. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciate.

[rodeo_joe1]

17 hours ago, david_benyukhis said:

Printer has RGB mode. Do I need change this mode to CMYK?

No. The printer driver does all that automatically.

CMYK mode is for Pre-press work. I.e. creating mechanical printing plates. Since you can't actually see the CMYK colour space properly on an RGB monitor, it's a bit pointless anyway. 

Although you might want to see if there's an ICM printer profile available for the particular paper+inkset you're using. 

[mikemorrellNL]

@rodeo_joe1The only photos I (very occasionally) print are just 1-off birthday cards for friends.  I print them in 'high quality' but the quality doesn't have to be that great. Usually, I just print photos using the default setting 'printer manages colors'. But I noticed that if I select "Photoshop manages colors' I can select from 8-10 printer profiles for my printer. TBH, I've never compared the results. Any opinion on which option you would recommend? The 'perceptual' rendering intent seems to be the best one for most purposes.

Thanks,

Mike

 

47 minutes ago, rodeo_joe1 said:

No. The printer driver does all that automatically.

CMYK mode is for Pre-press work. I.e. creating mechanical printing plates. Since you can't actually see the CMYK colour space properly on an RGB monitor, it's a bit pointless anyway. 

Although you might want to see if there's an ICM printer profile available for the particular paper+inkset you're using. 

 

[rodeo_joe1]

22 hours ago, mikemorrellNL said:

Any opinion on which option you would recommend?

Errr, whichever one works best for you. 

Sorry if that's a bit evasive, but after some experimentation years ago, I found that the printing paper used made the biggest difference to the result. I mean, quite huge, not a 'can just see it in good light in a side-by-side comparison', but a 'crikey, that's awful' difference.

At the time I had a cut-price supplier of a reasonable brand of glossy paper, which made it worthwhile tweaking the printer-driver settings to adjust the colour balance and amount of ink delivered. Tedious, but it worked - far better than switching between various rendering intents. 

This was effectively creating a profile for that paper on that particular printer. Which is why I would recommend downloading a paper profile if one's available.

Epson, Canon, etc design the default settings in their printer drivers to only give optimum results with their OEM papers. Use another (quite probably far cheaper) brand and you're on your own unless the paper manufacturer supplies printer profiles. 

Anyway, that's my experience. 

Edited December 16, 2022 by rodeo_joe1

[mikemorrellNL]

Thanks! And very reassuring. I have a small stock of (Canon) paper for my occasional prints. If 'auto' prints look OK, that's enough for me. If they don't, I try something else. 

Good to know that I don't need to worry too much about 'rendering intents.😊

On 12/16/2022 at 11:25 AM, rodeo_joe1 said:

Errr, whichever one works best for you. 

Sorry if that's a bit evasive, but after some experimentation years ago, I found that the printing paper used made the biggest difference to the result. I mean, quite huge, not a 'can just see it in good light in a side-by-side comparison', but a 'crikey, that's awful' difference.

...

 

[paddler4]

Rendering intent matters primarily if you have colors that are out of gamut. Perceptual rendering squashes the entire distribution to try to maintain the relationships among colors. Relative simply truncates (technically, censors) the distribution at the gamut boundaries. When you have no out of gamut colors in the entire color management workflow, it shouldn't matter much, if at all. I rarely find reason to use relative but try it just to see when I have appreciable out of gamut colors.

[rodeo_joe1]

On 12/20/2022 at 2:50 PM, paddler4 said:

Rendering intent matters primarily if you have colors that are out of gamut. Perceptual rendering squashes the entire distribution to try to maintain the relationships among colors. Relative simply truncates (technically, censors) the distribution at the gamut boundaries. When you have no out of gamut colors in the entire color management workflow, it shouldn't matter much, if at all. I rarely find reason to use relative but try it just to see when I have appreciable out of gamut colors.

Nice! A succinct summary of rendering intents without the maths or colour-space diagrams. Neatly done.