Yellow cast from Epson Stylus Photo R300?

jimf · March 24, 2004

I just picked up an Epson Stylus Photo R300, the theory being I can make proofs with it. Problem is that everything prints with a bit of a yellow cast.

I'm on MacOS X 10.3, printing with Epson's FilmFactory software.

Anyone have any hints on how to fix it?

wxwax · March 25, 2004

Is everything calibrated?

jimf · March 25, 2004

wxwax wrote:

Is everything calibrated?

I was kind of hoping somone here knew how to calibrate it :-). I can't find anything I can actually tweak.

wxwax · March 25, 2004

Ah. That gets into $$$.

See this thread.

:cry

pathfinder · March 25, 2004

wxwax wrote:

Is everything calibrated?

Waxy, I am going to play the devil's advocate here - My previous computer, a 500Mghz P3 with Photoshop 6 never would match the monitor and the printer output on an HP PhotoSmart P1100. I tried and tried.

So I replaced that setup a few years ago with a P4 from Gateway with their FDP1810 18" LCD display( which I think is a Sharp 18" LCD ) which I have NOT calibrated - I have thought about it MANY times - I even own and use the Monaco EZ Color with the Monoco Optix colorimeter - but I have NOT calibrated the FPD1810 because it is such a perfect match with the prints that I get from my Epson P2200 on Premium Lustre Epson paper.

Waxy, I talked to you about the Online Epson Print Academy that I subscribed to Iseemed to anoy you and I am sorry....... but they did a great job of explaining color management with special emphasis on how to set up the printer settings for the Epson printer SPECIFICALLY if you are using color mangement in Photoshop - like an Adobe color space - then you need to go into the advanced settings on the Epson printer software and instruct the printer NOT to do any color management - THIS IS TO AVOID REPEATING THE CHANGES IN THE COLOR after it is sent to the printer.

I printed 2 SuperB 13x19 images last night with the printer software set up to not mange the color in it but to take it straight from Photoshop CS and the images were just glorious - I wish you could see them - They match the original files perfectly

So Jimf - I would rec monitor calibration if I was not getting good results - I may still do it - indeed I just did it on my old system and will see how it now prints with an Epson 960 - got it to print on CD-Rs. But I would also check the set up for the printer software and make sure that it is set up properly if it is attached to a color managed image editing program.

The file I printed last night was printed at 300dpi - this is a link to my sugmug image - but it is not a 300dpi PSD file like I used at home.

wxwax · March 25, 2004

pathfinder wrote:

Waxy, I talked to you about the Online Epson Print Academy that I subscribed to Iseemed to anoy you and I am sorry

Path, you're good

I don't think you annoyed me, sorry if I gave you that impression. Folks have at the other place, but no-one ever has here.

You give excellent advice. I'll try to follow-it when I print a pic (which is an infequent event.) I'm a complete noob at profiling and calibration... it's technical stuff that makes my head ache. So I'm keen to learn from the experience of others.

jimf · March 25, 2004

pathfinder wrote:

Waxy, I talked to you about the Online Epson Print Academy that I subscribed to Iseemed to anoy you and I am sorry....... but they did a great job of explaining color management with special emphasis on how to set up the printer settings for the Epson printer SPECIFICALLY if you are using color mangement in Photoshop - like an Adobe color space - then you need to go into the advanced settings on the Epson printer software and instruct the printer NOT to do any color management - THIS IS TO AVOID REPEATING THE CHANGES IN THE COLOR after it is sent to the printer.

Hmm, that could very well be, there are several different color management things potentially in play. Apple has its own color management system which the printer installation software configured. In addition there's the FilmFactory software which has some manipulation settings (all set on "auto").

I have to do some more mucking with Photoshop to see how it does. So far the one image I printed with Photoshop seemed to have better quality than anything I printed through FilmFactory but it would be hard to detect a yellow cast in that particular shot. And I haven't even tried to find any calibration settings in Photoshop.

So Jimf - I would rec monitor calibration if I was not getting good results

Monitor seems pretty close (actually I have two, the one on the Mac laptop is very close, the external Samsung 170N is a little blue). It's only the printer that I'm having trouble with.

I'll have to check out the Epson Print Academy, thanks for the tip.

rutt · March 26, 2004

pathfinder wrote:

Waxy, I am going to play the devil's advocate here

I'm really going to play the devil's advocate. Color management can't compete with correct colors. You need to have the monitor and the printer set up correctly or you will get crap. So you need to use the right printing options for the paper you are using and your monitor's gamma has to be on the right planet.

But once that's done, the next most important thing is that the colors in your image are right. How do you know if not by looking at them on your monitor? By looking at the actual color numbers of the various colors in you image. For example, things that are neutral colors have to have equal amounts of red, green, and blue in the RGB color space. In CMYK, cyan has to be a few points higher than magenta and yellow for the lightest neutrals, and 10 points higher for the darkest blacks (C=80,M=70,Y=70,B=70). In LAB, A and B have to be 0 to make neutral. There are similar rules for non-neutral colors. Skin is always some shade of red, pink, brown, etc. depending on race, age, lighting, but it can't be green or blue. So the numbers have to reflect that. It's kind of a detective game to find areas of you image that have colors that you know something about and find some color correction that satisfies the various constraints. Doing this is a technique most associated with my color guru, Dan Margulis, and making great looking prints from good photos (and good looking prints form bad photos) is what he is all about. See his web site and particularly this chapter from his book.

The brain's image processing is so complex and so attuned to the 3d world of light and shadows that you can't see colors accurately. I know this sounds absurd, bu If you don't believe this, consider my favorite optical illusion:

The monitor and the printer are very different even when they are color managed. No printer's gaumut approaches a monitor and no monitor approaches life. It is all too easy to correct purely visually and make something that can't be printed with the same effect as it has on the monitor. That's just the way it is.

I find that images that have been color corrected by the numbers, look better under on almost all reasonably adjusted monitors and make better prints than those that are corrected purely by the eye. It used to drive me crazy that my prints would look good under sunlight (say) and bad under (say) iincandescent light. No more. Matte paper prints of by the numbers corrected images always look right. And they look noticably better on the monitor as well.

wxwax · March 26, 2004

Fantastic post, rutt. Hall of famer for the clear eyed, non technical description. Damn, now I hafta think about working with numbers, something I've spent my entire adult life avoiding. :cry

pathfinder · March 26, 2004

rutt wrote:

I'm really going to play the devil's advocate. Color management can't compete with correct colors. You need to have the monitor and the printer set up correctly or you will get crap. So you need to use the right printing options for the paper you are using and your monitor's gamma has to be on the right planet.

But once that's done, the next most important thing is that the colors in your image are right. How do you know if not by looking at them on your monitor? By looking at the actual color numbers of the various colors in you image. For example, things that are neutral colors have to have equal amounts of red, green, and blue in the RGB color space. In CMYK, cyan has to be a few points higher than magenta and yellow for the lightest neutrals, and 10 points higher for the darkest blacks (C=80,M=70,Y=70,B=70). In LAB, A and B have to be 0 to make neutral. There are similar rules for non-neutral colors. Skin is always some shade of red, pink, brown, etc. depending on race, age, lighting, but it can't be green or blue. So the numbers have to reflect that. It's kind of a detective game to find areas of you image that have colors that you know something about and find some color correction that satisfies the various constraints. Doing this is a technique most associated with my color guru, Dan Margulis, and making great looking prints from good photos (and good looking prints form bad photos) is what he is all about. See his web site and particularly this chapter from his book.

The brain's image processing is so complex and so attuned to the 3d world of light and shadows that you can't see colors accurately. I know this sounds absurd, bu If you don't believe this, consider my favorite optical illusion:

The monitor and the printer are very different even when they are color managed. No printer's gaumut approaches a monitor and no monitor approaches life. It is all too easy to correct purely visually and make something that can't be printed with the same effect as it has on the monitor. That's just the way it is.

I find that images that have been color corrected by the numbers, look better under on almost all reasonably adjusted monitors and make better prints than those that are corrected purely by the eye. It used to drive me crazy that my prints would look good under sunlight (say) and bad under (say) iincandescent light. No more. Matte paper prints of by the numbers corrected images always look right. And they look noticably better on the monitor as well.

I absolutely agree that rather than looking at colors only on the monitor you need to understand what the numbers in RGB (125,125,125 for a grey for example) or CMYK mean. You are dead on about that - but I think that for newbies like most of us, it takes a while looking at the numbers in the Info palette in PS to begin to make sense. White IS 255,255,255 Black IS 4,4,4 ar a reasonable facsimile thereof.

As you say - the difficult pictures to correct are the ones with really NO black or white or grey. That is why shooting wite or grey cards in your frame can sometimes be helpful.

And I find I am using the dodge, burn, color burn and saturate tools much more thtn I used to also....

rutt · March 26, 2004

Learning to get the colors right is one of those things that jsut takes practice, like learning to see through the viewfinder. When I read Dan's book the first time, it was a complete revalation and all made perfect sense. Until I tried to apply it. After a while I could correct images with clear high and low points and no real problems. After about a year and a half and after taking Dan's course, I can often hit the nail on the head, even for images without neutral high and low points. But I still get a lot from rereading parts of Professional Photoshop and reading the posts on the colortheory mailing list. I think color correction is a very deep area and even for a master like Dan, there are still things to learn.

But being able to correct an image that doesn't print correctly because it has a cast, is the most basic step along this road.

jimf · March 27, 2004

rutt wrote:

But being able to correct an image that doesn't print correctly because it has a cast, is the most basic step along this road.

I eventually found a variety of "automatic" image manipulations settings in Canon's FilmFactory and, indeed, by disabling them I got prints which are much more along the lines of what I was expecting. I have no idea why they thought it was appropriate to apply a hue shift.

In the end it really doesn't matter since Photoshop does a good job right out of the box. It's still not perfect WRT the monitor, Photoshop prints a little warmer, but that could at least be minor calibration issues. FilmFactory wasn't even close.

Someday I'll do "proper" calibration but, for now, the results are close enough for me. I really intend the photo printer to be used only for quick proofs anyway, the quality is just not good enough for the real thing: Even if the colors were perfect there are striations in the output. It just doesn't compete with a commercial quality printer.

Yellow cast from Epson Stylus Photo R300?

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