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.