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Author Topic: I won't PRINT again from LR, I'll use PRINTER...  (Read 8835 times)

mbaginy

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Re: I won't PRINT again from LR, I'll use PRINTER...
« Reply #20 on: May 13, 2015, 07:14:00 am »

Well Wayne, judging from my experience I'd say, that you've been fortunate.  Please take a look at that image I uploaded.  It printed as I had wanted, with equal margins left, right and on top.  But look at the silly readout of 3.2 mm for the top margin!!  It just don't make sense.  It can't be right!  That's the issue I have on a daily basis with the margins and dimensions shown in LR readout.  I simply can't believe them and can't understand why LR seems unable to perform simple math!  When setting margins in WinWord, I've never encountered problems.  But LR is always showing me inaccurate dimensions!

The problem with cut off prints can't be reproduced.  Most of the time the Print button works as it should.  Then I close shop for the day and the next time I print (same preset, same paper size, same settings), Print cuts off that part of the image!  Rebooting doesn't help, I'm not fiddling with settings in a manner which intends to foul up the proper workflow.  It simply happens.  Only work-around I've found is as explained previously.  It's an LR bug, I'm convinced of it.  And it seems, I'm not alone with this odd printing behavior.  I'm pleased to hear, that you haven't encountered strange LR behavior - I hope that continues.
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Wayne Fox

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Re: I won't PRINT again from LR, I'll use PRINTER...
« Reply #21 on: May 13, 2015, 04:26:19 pm »

Mark,

I don’t think I’ve been fortunate.  I teach lightroom at my store, and my staff at the store print using Lightroom daily to an 11880, a r3000 and a 3880.  We have a very diverse size of prints we make, and each day some of them will be printed with a preset because it’s a common size, others without using a preset because they are unique  When someone is having trouble getting it to work properly, I haven’t found a circumstance where they weren’t doing something not quite right (yet anyway).

I will admit your screenshot does look strange and if it prints differently than it looks it is difficult to try and figure out why. Without seeing screenshots of all of your dialog boxes it’s impossible to tell if you are doing things the same way I would. I’ve tried to duplicate your problem while traveling (other than “printing” it, but I’m pretty confident that what I see in the Lightroom preview window will be accurate) and I can’t duplicate what your screenshot shows. The only times I’ve had issues with this as when I entered something incorrectly. Again I don’t know what settings you have entered where, so it’s impossible to duplicate your exact circumstance.

So not that you are doing any of these, but more for the benefit of those following this post and having similar issues, 90% of the time I see students or my staff have issues with this, one of 3 things is the reason.

1.  They have transposed the width and height box in the custom paper setup screen, entering the width of the paper based on the orientation of the print.  The printer doesn’t care about that, it only wants to know how wide is the sheet of paper, and how long it is.  So if you enter 19” wide by 13” high because your print is going to be that size and is landscape orientation, you can run into problems, the typical symptom is the print is cutoff in weird places and only a piece of it printed.  I you are printing a landscape print on 13”x19” paper, you still enter 13” in the width and 19 in the height, they you click the landscape orientation.

2.  They have chosen a preset in the Print Settings dialog to set up the printer settings (paper type, feed path, resolution).  Lightroom can’t handle this.  It can store all of the settings you make in the Printer Settings dialog box inside of the Lightroom preset, but it doesn’t seem to be able to handle the fact that a preset was used in this dialog.  To be reliable this dialog must always be left to “Default Settings”. Even if the chosen preset correctly sets all of the correct information, the fact that something other than “default settings” is used, it will almost always cause problems if you save the settings while the preset is selected.

3. After making a change they click on the preset to save it, before they right click on it to store the changes.  As soon as you make any tweak to any setting, whether it is one of the 2 printer dialog boxes or the Lightroom settings on the right, LR will de-select your preset.  I’ve frequently seen users think they need to re-select that preset and then right click it to set the new settings.  Of course as soon as you click to select it, LR reverts to the settings in the preset so your changes are gone and it looks as though LR “forgot” the changes, when in fact they were never saved in the preset. It’s a little bit of an odd interface thing, but you have to right click the preset while it is not highlighted and select update with current settings. As soon as you do, it should highlight.

As I mentioned, you easily could have an issue that I can’t duplicate, it’s not like computers don’t do weird things at times, and so it could be you are doing everything the same as I would but getting an odd result.  I’ve never had a circumstance where using the print button doesn’t work but clicking the printer button then immediately the print button would.  (although this might be related to using a preset in the printer settings dialog). without screenshots of all dialog boxes it’s pretty hard to try and pinpoint if there is anything might be doing differently than I do.

I would be great to sort it out, if there is truly a bug, or if perhaps there’s something your are doing a little differently that logically should work but for some reason LR doesn’t like.
« Last Edit: May 13, 2015, 04:31:54 pm by Wayne Fox »
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BobShaw

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Re: I won't PRINT again from LR, I'll use PRINTER...
« Reply #22 on: May 13, 2015, 04:56:49 pm »

There are probably great reasons why your problem is happening, but similar problems occur from every application. I used to print from Aperture and created a mass of presets for every paper and paper size and still got things coming out the wrong size. Every time you did an update you lost your presets.

I then discovered Mirage Print and have never looked back. Printing is a science by itself. I don't edit in my print application so I never print from editing applications.
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Simon J.A. Simpson

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Re: I won't PRINT again from LR, I'll use PRINTER...
« Reply #23 on: May 15, 2015, 12:18:08 pm »

But look at the silly readout of 3.2 mm for the top margin!!  It just don't make sense.  It can't be right!  That's the issue I have on a daily basis with the margins and dimensions shown in LR readout.  I simply can't believe them and can't understand why LR seems unable to perform simple math!  When setting margins in WinWord, I've never encountered problems.  But LR is always showing me inaccurate dimensions!

A margin of 3.2mm makes me wonder if this is being derived from the printer’s safe edge margin (assuming it’s not printing borderless) ?

What I am also wondering is whether this is a communication ‘error’ between the printer and LR.  What would be useful to have is a screenshot of your PageSetup dialogue to see how the settings therein relate to what LR is showing.

I also note, and this is probably unrelated, that the decimal points in the dimension in your screenshot are shown as commas rather than full stops (I know countries other than the UK and Europe use this convention).  I'm just interested to know why this might be ?
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mbaginy

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Re: I won't PRINT again from LR, I'll use PRINTER...
« Reply #24 on: May 16, 2015, 03:50:43 am »

Wayne, thanks for your extensive explanation.  I've been double and triple checking my settings and am convinced of an LR bug.
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mbaginy

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Re: I won't PRINT again from LR, I'll use PRINTER...
« Reply #25 on: May 16, 2015, 03:52:19 am »

Bob, I'll give Mirage a try.  Would have preferred to stick with LR, rather than use additional software, but I'll give it a whirl.
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mbaginy

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Re: I won't PRINT again from LR, I'll use PRINTER...
« Reply #26 on: May 16, 2015, 04:10:50 am »

A margin of 3.2mm makes me wonder if this is being derived from the printer’s safe edge margin (assuming it’s not printing borderless) ?

What I am also wondering is whether this is a communication ‘error’ between the printer and LR.  What would be useful to have is a screenshot of your PageSetup dialogue to see how the settings therein relate to what LR is showing.

I also note, and this is probably unrelated, that the decimal points in the dimension in your screenshot are shown as commas rather than full stops (I know countries other than the UK and Europe use this convention).  I'm just interested to know why this might be ?
Simon, yes, the top margin of 3.2mm is the minimum margin (unless printing boarderless).  But the dimension itself seems meaningless.  Take a look at the screen shots below.  The dimension could be 10mm or 25mm or whatever - it never corresponds to the actual top margin!  I'm amazed that others seem to be able to set paper size, then three margins and the resulting image is sized in the remaining space.  I've never been able to do that.

I don't see any mistake in my page setup.  I've uploaded a view of this.

I've been able to use my workaround so prints are not cut off (at times).  And I've been able to find a workflow for print layout by doing the math myself.

As to the decimal points (comma vs. period), it's sometimes frustrating that some software requires commas, others a period.  My LR version requires commas - else I get an error message.  I downloaded the software in Germany but use the English language setting.  I don't know what is used in the US.  is there a difference between English and American versions?  I never knew that commas were used in England instead of periods (full stops?).  Converting between inches and millimeters causes enough anguish.  My MOAB 13 x 19" paper is named super B/A3 in the page setup.  Then buying frames requires me to convert to metric.  What a pain!  Didn't Jimmy Carter want the US to convert to metric?
« Last Edit: May 16, 2015, 04:14:53 am by Mike D. B. »
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Wayne Fox

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Re: I won't PRINT again from LR, I'll use PRINTER...
« Reply #27 on: May 16, 2015, 11:37:49 pm »

Wayne, thanks for your extensive explanation.  I've been double and triple checking my settings and am convinced of an LR bug.
I still am very doubtful there is a Lightroom bug, but I suppose there might be a driver issue on your machine.

Based on the first image you posted and what I think you are trying to accomplish,  I think you would be better served to use the custom package option to accomplish what I think you are trying to do, as the single image option assumes you are centering everything, so as you discovered you end up having to do some math to try and create the offset based on increasing the bottom margin.  When I use the single image option, I am trying to center the image, so the two side margins are always the same, and the top and bottom margin are the same (and must be larger than the minimum margin in the printer driver).  The cell size is always the full size, result is the image is centered on the paper. So I would never have settings similar to what were posted in the last images.

If I wanted to create an image with a margin on top and sides that were equal, and the bottom larger, I would do this with a custom paper size where the margins are entered there instead of in Lightroom. Then when using the custom package option in LR those margins are then locked out, you can’t put the image node there  So drag the image into the page, drag the entire image to snap it to the top left corner, drag down the bottom right corner till it snaps to the margin, and accept whatever the bottom is.  Pretty quick.

Maybe I’m clueless as to what you are trying to accomplish, but I’ve never found a circumstance in the thousands of images I and my staff have printed from lightroom where I couldn’t get what I wanted pretty easily.  MiragePrint is a nice program, but I’m sort of the opposite opinion of bob (and not meaning any disrespect), Lightroom is certainly designed to make printing easy,and I left the world of RIP’s a few years ago.  One of the main advantages of LR is not having to produce a tiff file to send to the printer if I have done everything within Lightroom. As I mentioned, we print from it all day every day with no real issues.
« Last Edit: May 17, 2015, 02:15:08 am by Wayne Fox »
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