Fuji Satin paper and Epson R2400

[CyberPet]

Hi everyone!

This is my premiere post on this forum, so bare with me if I'm doing it all wrong. I have tried to search, but I couldn't find anything, so if I've missed a cool search feature and this topic has been discussed, please let me know (and guide me into the right direction).

I have just recently (like 2 days ago) bought an Epson R2400 and I'm so far very pleased with it. I've managed (after a bit of trial and mostly errors) managed to get some decent prints out of Epsons own paper (Photo Glossy and Semi glossy in A4 that I had since the old days), although I do notice that the prints (skin tones mostly) tend to draw towards yellow and my bw's are a bit green (printing from sRGB), but I can adjust that in Potoshop with an adjustment layer until I've learnt to control those parts (hints about that would be appreciated too).

Now I want to go bigger (as that's the point with the printer), and I have the Fuji Satin A3+ paper. I did cut it down to smaller pieces, as I figured I woudln't be so lucky to get it right at once. And I was right. The image is way too bright.

I used the basic settings that I used for Epsons Semi glossy paper, but I'm confused as when I say that Photoshop should control the color management, I still only see the Epson drivers settings in the Print settings. I choose the profile for the Fuji Satin paper in Photoshop's print dialog (I'm using CS4 on a Macintosh btw, and did download the latest drivers from Epsons website instead of using the disk), but there's of course no such choice in the settings, for the Fuji paper, when I hit the print button an get into the settings for the printer. I can only choose Epsons paper - and "Other", but it doesn't seem to be what I should do.

So, I guess my most simple question is, should I tell it that it is "Epson Semi glossy" (as it's the the most similar paper in quality), as when I did use "Other" it came out way too bright (like I had over exposed the image with 2.5 stop).

Or am I doing something very wrong?

Thanks in advance!

[CyberPet]

Ok, I did miss that I should choose Semi glossy in the Epson printer setup (re-read the info from Epson for the ICC profile). So now I think I got it printing without looking like I've put the print in a glass of milk.

I did notice something odd, I cannot control the color management in the print dialog, that part is greyed out (no matter what I do in Photoshop CS4) - there's also just two options, ColorSync and the one controlled by Epson. Although I do have the option to choose Color Setting to "Off (No Color Adjustment)" in the Epson part of the Print dialog (using driver 6.12). So that's what I used.

However - now the print looks a bit "muddy" instead (hmm, never happy) and it's just a tad darker than the image I see on screen, but that could be my calibration being off for the time being. The colors look more accurate than the prints from Epsons own paper (i.e. less yellow), which makes me confused. If it had been a nozzle problem, it would be fixable - but the difference is kind of big between the colors from the Epson paper and the Fuji Paper (a tad more advantage to Fuji for color accuracy - but darker/muddier than the prints on the Epson paper, that looks to be more accurate when it comes to brightness).

Could this "muddiness" be fixed with the Color Density setting under the Paper Configuration menu?

How much more confusing could this be?

[CyberPet]

Never mind me, I'm talking to myself. But hopefully this might help someone else.

Turns out the print drivers was *not* installed correctly at first, so I reinstalled them and now the prints looks the same - regardless if it's Epson or Fuji. The Fuji Satin paper do show up as a tad less contrasty than the Epson papers, but not much enough to complain about (just a side by side comparison with the same image shows the tiny change). All three papers I'm using (Glossy, Semi-glossy and Fuji) are now accurate in colors and are matching what I see on the screen.

The muddy prints also had a good explanation, for some reason the monitor had gone to "full blast" in power, so the images on the screen was brighter than the prints. But when I turned down the brightness to the level it was when I calibrated the monitor, it was actually accurate. (Or at least such a small difference that it's due to viewing light compared to monitor light).

And one of the best parts was also, no more green prints for black & white either! That part I thought was some "quirk" that i hadn't figured out, but it turned out it was nothing I had to figure out, it was all due to old drivers. The new printer drivers did the trick (the now proper installed 6.12 that is), completely black & white prints, no tint at all, and I can also finally print borderless (that was driving me nuts as well!).

So lesson to be learned: Do not take for granted that new drivers are used in the Printers settings in Mac OS X, even if you download new ones before starting to use the printer. Apple has pre-installed a lot of drivers and doesn't seem to want to replace them with the new ones unless you do it manually. So what I did was that I removed the old, pre-installed drivers by Apple, and installed the newly downloaded ones from Epson, and finally everything fell into place.

All the wasted paper thanks to the old driver that stuck made my hair go grey.

Thanks for letting me vent to myself. Hopefully this thread hasn't been a complete waste of bandwidth as I'm sure others will encounter the same thing and will not find the answer that easy (it never occurred to me that the drivers could have been "stuck").

Now I'm off to print some more gorgeous black & white images!