Sudden change in LR2 printing

[Martin Allen]

Unexpectedly, LR2 stopped producing accurate prints for me today.  The prints are now coming out too dark and with a shift in color.  This occurs when I select a custom profile but, oddly, not when I select an Epson canned profile.  

I've seen other posts (in other forums) describing this type of printing problem,  but the surprise for me is that it occurred to me out of the blue. I have been printing without difficulty, first with LR1 and more recently with LR2, and have gotten consistently good prints, matching the screen, using profiles I've made with my Eye-One Pro and Epson's canned profiles.  I print with an R2400 and, for glossy snapshots, an R280.  My computer is a MacPro using OSX 10.5.4.  

I can't understand why my prints no longer match the screen and that this occurs only when I select a custom profile.  In other posts I've seen the dark print problem described as possibly a glitch in which LR2 is not communicating correctly with the Epson driver.  I have the driver set to No CM and LR2 set to use a profile that is correct for the paper I'm using.  I know that the custom profiles are OK because the prints match perfectly when I print them via CS3 or Qimage.  The problem only occurs when I print the same image via LR2 using the same custom profile and settings.  I mentioned above that this problem started happening unexpectedly today.  I have not done anything to change my LR2 setup in the past day except to install the Adobe  beta camera profiles.  I tried reinstalling LR2 (without deleting the earlier application file) but that didn't help.  I don't know what to do now.  My LR2 is useless for printing as it stands now.  

I'd appreciate any help on how to correct this.  Until this happened, I've been using LR2 for most of my printing finding it to be accurate and easy to use.  All that's changed.  

Thanks.  

Martin

[stever]

haven't experienced this yet in LR2, but did in LRl.4.  goes away if you reboot and reopen LR - first time this happened i went nuts thinking i'd lost the printer profile or

only happened 2 or three times over several months

[Martin Allen]

Further to my post, I now think the problem I encountered stemmed from something I screwed up in making the profiles that produced the bad prints, not to LR2 misbehaving.  I reviewed the various test prints I made and found that the problem (dark and too saturated prints) occurred when I used two profiles I made yesterday using Bill Atkinson's 1728 patch targets and following the workaround that Eric has posted on this forum and on his website for using larger targets with Eye-One Match. This was my first try using this technique. Anyway, I discovered that the bad prints occurred when I used the new profiles but not when I used older profiles I'd made with Eye-One Match and the included 918 patch target. So, I made a new profile from scratch this morning using the 1728 patch target and, to my relief, the prints using this profile come out fine. I conclude from this that the likely culprit yesterday was in my procedure somewhere. Anyway, for now all is back to normal.

Thanks Stever for your prompt reply to my post yesterday.

Martin