12. Printing with a custom profile
I took delivery of a new Epson R800 inkjet printer a couple of weeks ago as I have been keen to explore colors beyond the Adobe RGB (1998) space for some time now. I selected this model of printer due to its small footprint (it is only an A4 printer) and also for the fact that it uses primary red and blue inks in addition to the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black inks (a Matte Black and Gloss Optimizer make 8 inks in all). Rather than trust to the ‘canned’ profiles, or worse still use the printer color management, I decided to purchase new custom profiles made for Epson’s Archival Matte and Premium Glossy photo papers. A company called Image Science created the profiles in just 24 hours and I set about printing images with saturated colors that fall outside of the Adobe RGB (1998) gamut (ProPhoto colors). The printer is, of course, fabulous when working with custom profiles, although the printer does share the habit with other budget printers from Epson of tending to lay down too much ink in the darkest shadows (see the printing chapter in my Elements/CS2/CS3 Photoshop books for the quick fix). The extra colors that can be achieved by printing from the ProPhoto space I believe to be very marginal (compared to printing from the Adobe RGB space) but the overall quality of the print when using an R800 in conjunction with a custom profile is superb. For better shadow response and fabulous black and white prints I decided to purchase a third profile. Normally a profile target (available for download from the Image Science website) has to be printed as an Untagged file with the color management switched off in both Photoshop’s print dialog box and the printer driver, with the third target print however, I left the Color Control switched on in the printer driver and set the Gamma control to 1.8 and selected Epson’s Standard setting (this used to be called the Photo Realistic settings in older printer drivers). When this target print is profiled it results in the creation of a more linear profile for budget inkjet printers. Although the color gamut is reduced the shadow tones separate from black more easily and a high quality black and white print can be produced using the Color setting in the printer driver. Although the Black setting in the Epson R800 printer driver produces very good results (due to the fact that the ink droplets are extremely small on the R800 - that in turn leads to high-quality highlights) the brightness values of the print and screen view are no longer similar, and the print is surprisingly not a neutral (gray) as printing with the color inks using this more linear profile. If this is all a little too much information but the idea of fabulous print quality is appealing be sure to contact Jeremy or Amy at Image Science or visit their very informative website. ImageScience.com.au
Happy printing
Mark
Photoshop CS3: Essential Skills is published by Focal Press and available from Amazon.com.
Wednesday, 18 April 2007
My old Jag and a piece of white silk captured on a Fuji digicam - Composite image created using a displacement map - one of the images used to explore the extended color gamut of the Epson R800
