Magenta cast, please help

[John Chardine]

This is a familiar type of post I am sure but I am at a loss.

I have been printing quite nicely to my old Epson SP 7600, with American Inkjet Systems inks on nice matte papers from my Mac with latest El Capitan installed. I only update Epson drivers from their site, not Apple's. I am on the road quite a bit and my routine is to fire up the printer when I get back and run a nozzle check and then cleaning as necessary. I was away recently and went through this procedure.

Attached is image of two prints from the same file from Lightroom. The bigger one at right was made around April 2016. The left hand print is what I am getting now, with a decided magenta cast. My nozzle checks are perfect (rare for my 7600). I tried printing from another Mac with slightly older OS and got same result. Am getting same cast with other files as well.

Is there anything I am missing?

Thanks.

[John Chardine]

Just saw previous post on latest page re. Epson 9890 and magenta tint. I followed a suggestion of Mark Segal to and set profile to "Managed by printer". With this setting, magenta cast is gone it could be a profiling issue.

So what has changed between prints for me- new version of Mac OS for sure, and new version of Lightroom as well.

[Mark D Segal]

Is it exactly the same inks and the same paper between the two versions of the photo you posted?

[John Chardine]

Yes Mark.

[Mark D Segal]

In that case, it's possible something or other "drifted" (a number of possibilities). I would suggest re-profiling and see whether that helps.

[John Chardine]

There's something broken somewhere. Tried two different computers, printing from Lr and Ps using the Cone/Epson icm profile for the paper I was using and my own profile (which used to work) and I get the same colour cast result. If I let the printer handle everything and turn off colour management, the prints are pretty good.

[John Chardine]

By way of a quick update. (Out of Lightroom CC, latest version), I printed with these settings: Profile: Managed by printer, in Print dialogue, Color Matching: ColorSync with my Velvet Fine Art profile selected, and got a very nice result. If I choose the profile directly at the right hand side of the Lightroom Print module screen, I get the magenta result. Does this "experiment" tell anyone anything about what might be happening?

[schertz]

Did the problem start after you upgraded to the latest version of Lightroom? If you down grade to an earlier version and try printing are the colours correct? There seems to be a bug in the latest version of Lightroom and photoshop which screws up colour management when printing. See here:

http://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=111358.0

 and the linked Adobe forum discussion. Don't use application managed colour when printing from the latest release of Lightroom and photoshop on a Mac computer! If printing at this time is vital, consider downgrading to an earlier version, or printing from another program.

MS

[John Chardine]

Yes, Lightroom has been "upgraded". I'll give it a try. Thanks for the link. I had missed this recent post but it fits pretty well what I am experiencing.

[John Chardine]

Rolled back to Lightroom CC 2015 release and printed- cast has gone. Meanwhile, several hours of trial and error, ink and paper waste and all I am is back to where I was. Anyway, many thanks- I really did think my 7600 had had it!

[Mark D Segal]

Rolled back to Lightroom CC 2015 release and printed- cast has gone. Meanwhile, several hours of trial and error, ink and paper waste and all I am is back to where I was. Anyway, many thanks- I really did think my 7600 had had it!

Good.

And yes I have gone through the same - wasted time, ink and paper only to discover that my workflow and equipment remains fine - only the basic printing applications are the problem.