Nailing down the variables.

For an index of all articles about the Epson ET8550 printer, click here.

When it comes to getting good color matching out of your printer the exercise has much in common with rocketry. It’s always something. There is a host of variables and just when you think you are prepared for take-off some new gremlin comes along and your rocket or print leaves a useless mess on the launch pad or paper, as the case may be.

What follows reflects my experience with a 2010 Mac Pro running OS 10.13.6 High Sierra with an Epson ET-8550 ink jet printer. An old Mac Pro because “it just works” (remember those days?) and an old version 6.4 of stand-alone Lightroom because it will be a cold day in hell before greedy Adobe extracts a license fee annuity out of me, with the near impossibility of ceasing monthly payments, short of death by the payor.

See what I mean?

Most of this piece is likely of generic applicability to Mac users with this Epson printer who opt to use the Epson non-AirPrint driver, the only driver which will properly allow the user to invoke custom ICC paper profiles in Lightroom. If you have a supply of paper where an ICC profile is not available from the manufacturer, having a tailored profile made is the way to go.

In this earlier piece I explained how my large stock of obsolete HP Premium Gloss photo paper required procurement of a tailored ICC paper profile to optimize screen-print color matching. The HP paper is no longer made and the standard HP profile for that paper, while close, rendered Caucasian skin tones slightly too pink to be acceptable.

The Hollywood place I used (Freestyle) was happy with my second set of color patch prints (I messed up on the first pair and they did a bit of hand holding – thank you, Eric! – to help me get it right) and emailed the new profile to me last night. $99 well spent. To complicate matters Apple Mail kept erasing their emails and I had to resort to an old Gmail address which, of course would only work with iOS as my Mac Pro is too old to allow the use of Gmail, if you can believe that. More planned obsolescence.

So having installed the non-AirPrint Epson printer profile, and deleted the default AirPrint version, as explained here, I found that I could not print on 13”x19” paper. After some whirring nothing happened. I am limited to 8”x10” with the Epson non-AirPrint driver. It’s best pointing out that exactly the same thing happened trying to print using Apple’s Preview application, suggesting the fault lies with Epson not with Adobe or Apple. As with Lightroom, the printer would happily make 13″ x 19″ prints using the AirPrint driver but resolutely refused to print anything with the non-AirPrint driver.

This is why it makes sense to beat this to death before moving on. You really do not want to revisit the large number of variables when it comes to making prints – paper size, margins, paper quality, print quality, ICC profile, printer driver and on and on. Once it’s right, save everything in LR presets – see below – and printing becomes a one-click affair, as it should be.

Having determined that the Epson absolutely refuses to print on 13” x 19” paper if that’s what you dial in in LR when the non-AirPrint Epson printer driver is used, some experimentation was in order. LR works fine with the AirPrint driver at that size but that driver does not invoke custom ICC paper profiles correctly, if at all, and the colors are unacceptable. So the AirPrint default driver that Epson forces you to use unless you know better is useless, in practical terms.

However, the Epson prints 8” x 10” prints just fine on either 8.5” x 11” or 13” x 19” paper. Thus I had to try some sleight of hand and discovered that if you tell the printer the paper is a tad under 13” x 19” it will print, if not borderless, using the Epson non-AirPrint printer driver. The mats I use have an opening of 12.75” x 18.75”, so borderless makes little sense. You simply lose some printed image with borderless prints once matted. And if there is a benefit to using borders then it’s that here is no overspray from the ink jet nozzles messing up the innards of the printer.

In the LR Print module go into Page Setup and you will see:

Click the Paper Size drop down and click on Manage Custom Sizes, and input the variables shown:

This enables you to tell the Epson that your paper is 12.75″ x 18.75″ in size.

Now click on Printer in the LR Print module, clicking Color Matching in the third drop down box. This is an important check. You must see the radio button against Colorsync checked and both buttons greyed out. This confirms that the ICC color profile will be used by LR when printing, not Epson’s stock profiles:

Cancel out of that screen and now click on Print Settings in that same third drop down box:

Conform your setting as with the above. I have chosen Ultra Premium Photo Paper Glossy, which is consonant with my HP paper.

Next, in the Print module of LR scroll the right hand panel (hit F8 to toggle it on or off) and look at the Margins section at the top. Set your Margins and Cell Size as shown:

Then scroll down to the Color Management section:

Click the Profile drop down and choose the ICC paper profile you previously placed in Finder->Your username->Library->ColorSync. You do not want ‘Managed by Printer’ in this box. That setting passes control to Epson’s printer profiles. Select your profile and that’s what the printer will use.

You are ready to print and the Epson ET-8550 will print on 13″ x 19″ paper as long as you tell it that the paper is 12.75″ x 18.75″. The result fits the cut out in my mats perfectly with no white border showing.

Using the new profile from Freestyle the results are excellent. The slight pinkish tinge in Caucasian skin tones (using either Epson Glossy or HP Glossy ICC paper profiles) is gone and the print is a close match to the profiled Benq display used, in as much as that is ever possible. After all, we are comparing a device with a large dynamic range with its own controlled trans-illumination light source – the display – with one with a very poor dynamic range – the print, judged by reflected midday daylight of uncertain color temperature.

Ink use? I must have made some 20 13” x 19” prints – you need to judge at full size, IMO – and can confirm that the ink use from those generous capacity 70ml ‘tanks’ the EPSON uses is very frugal. Here are the levels now. Bear in mind that a good part of the drop from full results from the fact that the printer was new when first filled and the first fill uses maybe 1/8 of each tank to prime the heads and feed tubes – that’s equal to one half the distance between the quarter marks in the image. Paper use? What do I care? I have hundreds and hundreds of sheets in my inventory.

Ink levels after the first fill up and some 20 13″ x 19″ prints.

Like I said at the start of this entry, with printers it’s always something. Here’s to the next problem …. and no thanks to Epson for their poor printer driver designs and installations.

Using Apple Preview.

For an index of all articles about the Epson ET8550 printer, click here.

I elected to use Freestyle Photo to generate the ICC profile for my Epson printer + HP Glossy paper combination. One reason is that their instructions are clear with no broken links. The other is that they include instructions for printing their test targets with Apple applications. Many of the other profiling sites use an Adobe utility and – surprise, surprise – it’s no longer available in an Apple version.

I was fortunate to deal with Eric Joseph at Freestyle and it’s clear he has forgotten more about color profiling than most of us will ever know. An articulate professional with excellent analytical and teaching skills, he guided me through what follows. I’m repeating the instructions here as the value of what is out there on the web approximates that of a used toilet paper roll.

What appears below applies to any paper used with the Epson.

Click the image.

Freestyle Photo have you use Apple Preview with OS X Ventura for printing. Their instructions are here.

What follows are instructions on how to create a print of the Freestyle targets with no color management, which allows them to craft a proper ICC profile for your printer.

I am on the older Mac OS High Sierra (10.13.6) and Preview did not show me all those printing options which appear in the Freestyle/Ventura instructions. Eric advised that the default installation with the ET-8550 is of the Air Print driver. Indeed, go to System Preferences->Printers & Scanner and choose the E-8550 and you will see the word ‘AirPrint’ where the red arrow appear in the following image:

You do NOT want to see ‘AirPrint’ at the arrowed location.

‘Airprint’ is NOT the printer driver you want. AirPrint drivers are significantly ‘crippled’ and do not provide the full functionality needed for this exercise. We must de-install the AirPrint driver by hitting the ‘-‘ symbol. See the bulleted steps below.

The goal, when printing Freestyle’s two test targets, is to avoid any color management at the printing stage, so that the un-managed image is what appears on the test print. You need to activate the stock non-AirPrint driver to be able to accomplishing this in Preview. Both the AirPrint driver (default) and the non-AirPrint driver are installed as part of the normal installation process, but it is the AirPrint version which is activated by default. And that is not the one we want.

Do not try doing this in Photoshop or Lightroom. Those complex applications make it impossible to turn off all software color management.

In System Preferences->Printers & Scanners:

• De-activate the default AirPrint driver by hitting the ‘-‘ sign
• Hit the ‘+’ symbol
• Hit ‘Add Printer or Scanner’. Do NOT hit ‘EPSON ET-8550 Series’ – that’s the AirPrint default installation
• In the screen which opens click on ‘EPSON ET-8550 Series Bonjour Multifunction’
• The ‘Use’ box will appear, filled with ‘Secure AirPrint’. WRONG. Drop down that box and select ‘EPSON ET-8550 Series’. You will get the message ‘Setting up EPSON ET-8550 Series’. That’s it – the full printer driver is now installed and you will have retained wireless printing capability if that was your original choice. You can also use an Ethernet or USB cable.
• The full range of Print options will now appear in Apple Preview.

Fire up Preview and load the first of the two targets downloaded from Freestyle. Set the drop downs in the red rectangle-outlined boxes in Preview->Print as shown:

Follow these exactly. This is for HP Gloss paper.

You want ‘EPSON Color Controls’, not ‘Colorsync’.

Now that you have Epson Color Controls, check you have turned them off thus:

Check that there is no printer driver color management.

In my case a Scale setting of 101% delivers the required
8 5/16″ target height called for by Freestyle.

The 101% size setting is required to exactly comply with Freestyle’s sizing requirements stated on their site. Adjust the ‘Scale’ setting until you comply with their required printed target height of 8 5/16″.

Print the first, then the second target, being careful to replicate the above settings for the second (they will change to defaults), pay $99, add your name and details to the printed targets and mail your targets in a stout cardboard envelope to Freestyle. And never handle paper without cotton gloves – the grease from your fingers will not help with the profiling process, nor with print longevity.

Doing it right with cotton gloves.

The non-custom ICC way.

For an index of all articles about the Epson ET8550 printer, click here.

Color matching:

In yesterday’s column which introduced my newly acquired Epson ET-8550 ink jet dye printer I mentioned the possibility of having a tailored ICC profile created for printing with my large remaining inventory of costly HP Premium Glossy paper.

Here I examine a way of close color matching using off-the-shelf profiles from paper manufacturers.

First I downloaded a selection of profiles from Red River and Moab, placing them in this directory on my Mac Pro:

The Finder path for these appears at the base of the image.

In addition to the Moab and Red River profile collections you can see that I have retained the old HP profiles in the interest of seeing which of this large selection works best with HP Premium Glossy paper in the Espob ET-8550.

The approach is to use the Lightroom Develop module with ‘Soft Proofing’ enabled to compare the hard copy print with what the (profiled) display – a Benq PD3200Q – shows.

Make a selection of print with several different profiles – I used ones with “glossy” in the name – and select the one which looks best to you. Then slice it in half and paste it to the display which is in Develop Soft Proofing mode, thus. The goal is to change profiles used by Lightroom until the displayed image matches the hard copy most closely. Here is the print at right, Scotch-taped to the Benq display:

Click here for a full screen display.

For my HP paper I determined that a Red River Paper profile named RR Polar Gloss Metallic Ep ET-8550′ was the best match, so that’s what I use in printing from Lightroom.

The Red River profile selected in the LR Print module.

Is it perfect? No, but it will more than do until I can procure a tailor made profile.

Quality:

For best quality color prints. Slow and worth it.

There are two discernible differences between choosing ‘Normal’ and ‘Best’. In Normal mode a 13″ x 19″ print is completed in under 3 minutes, using bi-directional printing. In ‘Best’ that takes 12 minutes of single direction printing – spray the ink droplets/return the printhead to the start position/repeat. Given that you can load half a dozen sheets of paper in the rear feeder and as LR/OS X can stack the jobs if more than one is sent to the printer, what’s your hurry?

And you do not want to be in a hurry because in Normal mode blotchy colors are clearly visible in areas of what should be smooth tone. In Best smooth tones are smooth. Easily better enough that the longer print time makes sense.

Time to move on.

For an index of all articles about the Epson ET8550 printer, click here.

The Epson ET-8550 photo printer.

After many years using/loving/hating and repairing my HP DesignJet 90 wide carriage printer, it has finally died. The cause cannot be identified in the factory manual, parts are very hard to source, and I have just about used up my last set of print heads and ink cartridges. So the HP, sadly, has to be recycled. Needless to add, HP wants nothing to do with it nor is there a repair facility out there which is remotely interested. It served me well for 20 years and because HP’s support is worse than a broken crutch for a one legged man, gave rise to a whole series of technical articles on this blog. Yes, the DJ90 was a high maintenance beast but, oh! my, it made spectacular prints when it chose to and the HP inks on HP paper remain fade-free even in prints made two decades ago.

The replacement for the DJ, the Epson ET-8550, is limited to 13″ wide prints, compared with the 18″ for the HP, but is significant in one major respect. The ‘ET’ in the model designation stands for ‘Eco Tank’. Let me translate. Epson has migrated from the ‘rip off the customer on ink cartridges’ business model to the ‘rip off the customer on the printer’s price’ one. I paid $600 after a $200 Black Friday discount but it really should have been more like $400 for what you get. However, instead of crazy priced, low ink content cartridges, Epson has adopted a ‘refill from cheap ink bottles’ approach so no cartridges are involved and each of the 6 ink colors can be had in a 70ml bottle for under $20. Stated differently, ink costs are 90% lower than for the DesignJet or any other consumer quality printer be it from Epson, Canon or HP. Hence the ‘Eco’ in ‘Eco Tank’, saving our landfills from millions of empty ink cartridges, refilling them with hundreds of thousands of empty ink bottles. Please do yourself a favor and never use cheaper aftermarket inks. Save a few pennies and risk major repairs when your print heads clog or your client sues you because the print for which you charged him good money 12 months ago has started fading.

How about paper costs? When it was clear a while back that HP was abandoning the DesignJet dye printer in favor of pigment ink designs I bought up a bunch of their superb swellable dye paper at 10 cents on the dollar. The paper is specifically formulated to absorb ink dyes, and needs time to dry and stabilize after printing. It’s worth the wait as it is superb. It bears repeating that nothing surpasses illustration of a photographer’s skill as a well printed, matted and framed large glossy print. Here is roughly half of my inventory of that HP Premium Glossy printing paper:

Some 1,000 sheets of 13″ x 19″ all told.

With premium Epson paper running $2-3 a sheet in that size you can reckon that little lot is worth some $2,500, so I’m not about to chuck it out with the DesignJet. But where to find an ICC profile? The ICC paper profile is loaded into Lightroom or whatever printing software you use and confers the right colors matched to a specific paper when you hit the ‘Print’ button. Obviously, no one makes ICC profiles for obsolete HP paper used on a current Epson printer.

The Internet to the rescue. Looking at the site of a major paper supplier – Moab – I ran across a listing of ICC profile makers they recommend. If it’s good enough for a major paper manufacturer, it’s good enough for me. A quick check showed Freestyle to have the clearest instructions without broken links which seem to bedevil many of the other suppliers – remember, a profile is specific to a paper and to a printer:

Click the image.

While their Mac instructions are for OS 13 Ventura I checked and was told that my earlier OS X 10.13.6 High Sierra OS is just fine, and just to make sure that when their test pages are printed using Apple Preview to make sure color management is turned off. Their instructions how to use Preview are clear.

So when my Epson ET-8550 arrives later today from the good people at B&H the first task will be to run the downloaded routines from that site and send them the two resulting calibration prints from the new printer so that they can generate a profile specifically for HP Premium Glossy swellable dye paper, spending $100 to save $2,500 of paper stock. Now that’s what I call return on investment.

As a matter of interest, the Epson uses five dye inks for photo prints and one pigment ink for it’s other tasks, like printing letters and the like. It’s the first five we are concerned with. The printer is actually marketed as an ‘office’ printer and includes a scanner and multiple paper trays for letters and the like. The latter are of no interest to me.

As for results fron the new printer, I will follow up this piece with some details but do not expect the outpouring of technical articles occasioned by the poorly supported HP DesignJet all those years ago. First the Epson has been on the market some 2 years now so there is much material available. Second, I recommend the site of Keith Cooper named Northlight Images. It’s comprehensive, written by a technically skilled person and with a minimum of sales BS, not to mention a solid command of the Queen’s …. err, King’s …. English, probably because he is English, like me.