Photoshop Print Settings - Please Help!

[mark lucas]

Can somebody please help me.

 

I'll try to be brief.

 

I have an Epson R800 Printer and am using Photoshop CS.

 

Could somebody perhaps tell me exactly what settings I should be

using in Photoshop's print options.

 

Under Print Space do I use "Printer Color Management" or "Stylus

Photo R800" , or, indeed, neither of these?

 

I was using "same as source" but after doing some reading thought

that perhaps this wasn't the best option (although I was getting

satisfactory results, I wondered if they could be improved).

 

When I select one of the "Profile" options above, should I be able

to select the intent (it stays greyed out)?

 

In my "Printing Preferences" dialogue for my printer, should I be

selecting colour controls or ICM?

 

When I strayed from using "same as source" my prints came out

looking solarised and very dark. What am I doing wrong?

 

Many thanks in advance!

[jorge]

Mark,

 

I'm not familiar with the R800 (I am tho with the 1270 and 2200), thus I'm not sure if this printer allows the use of paper profiles. If that is affirmative, then use the paper profile provided by the paper manufacturer and in the printer properties dialog choose ICM and No Color Adjustment. If that doesn't work, then revert to Same as source and ICM -> Applied by Printer Software. Yet another possibility is to use Stylus Photo R800 (the printer profile) and ICM -> No Color Adjustment.

 

The simple logic behind this is to use *only one profile* at a time, so you either apply it in Photoshop or in the printer properties dialog. If you choose the former, then in the dialog you should have no adjustment whatsoever except for the closest paper choice; On the other hand, it's quite safe to choose Perceptual and then let the printer dialog apply the profiles.

 

About the color space, generally Perceptual will render good results but eventually you might want to try Relative Colorimetric in case some color shifting occurs. See the Photoshop Help for an explanation of color spaces.

[joachim]

Hi Mark,

 

the basic is to do it once. So either you can tell PS that you are using an EPSON R800 printer and tell the Printer not to mess with it (no ICM in the printer driver) or you tell PS not to bother (Printer Color Managment) and leave the conversion to the printer (ICM checked in the printer driver).

 

Renard DellaFave's links a nice document explaining this for Canon printers in http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=007U9k. I would expect the EPSON driver to be quite similar.

 

Hope this helps.

[mark lucas]

Thanks very much for the speedy response.

 

I can see now why people tie themselves in knots over colour management.

 

I've just tried setting the Print Space Profile to "Printer Colour Management" and in the Epson preferences dialogue, selected ICM and NOT checking the "no colour management" box.

 

This produced a good looking print. Is this an acceptable way to work, or could I be doing much better?

 

Also, why is the "Intent" box greyed out when I select "Printer Color Management"?

 

Many Thanks.

[mark lucas]

Thanks also to Joachim, whose response appeared as I was typing the above.

[jorge]

Mark,

 

>> This produced a good looking print. Is this an acceptable way to work, or could I be doing much better? <<

 

I think you might be able to squeeze some extra control by means of the manual color adjustment sliders, but you should not need that often. If the prints are coming out good, why mess with them?

 

>> Also, why is the "Intent" box greyed out when I select "Printer Color Management"? <<

 

Beats me. I have seen that behaviour with some settings but have never pursued the matter. It only happens iwhile selecting some profiles. Maybe somebody else can explain.

[micholos_vasilis]

This settings works good for me:

Print with previw:

Show more options:

Color managment:

Source space: Document

Print spase:Stylus Photo R800

intent:perceptual or relative calorimetric seldom absolute calorimetric, try and test one of this. Results depents on the image color content, read help on cs help about "Handling colors with a rendering intent"

In the printer dialog box,at advanced tab, select the paper type and the color managment you prefer. I am usally selecting:

Phote enhance tone:->normal effect:->none digital camera correctio->yes.

Experiment with the above selections