Since people have moved on from the original topic I posted, I just wanted to report that I finally got a vexing soft proofing issue with my new Epson R2880 straightened out with the help of Jim at ColorHQ.com! ColorHQ is where I bought my monitor and calibrator and one of the reasons I chose them at the time was that the price was competitive and while it wasn't the absolute cheapest, I could see that they were oriented toward serving the needs of graphics arts professionals and offer FREE phone tech support with people who are right there in Illinois.
To recap: my soft proof in Adobe Photoshop CS3 on a Mac running OS 10.4 was looking nothing like the print that came out of my Epson, even using Epson ink, Epson paper and ICC profiles downloaded from Epson's web site. Specifically, I was trying out two different matte papers, one of which was Velvet Fine Art. I had three sessions with Epson tech support over the phone, the guy at the camera shop where I bought the printer tried to help me, and I went over the monitor calibration process with Jim. I posted to this forum and the Adobe Photoshop forum, and got lots of suggestions, which I tried. The clue finally came when I noticed that if I checked "preserve RGB numbers" in the soft proof dialogue box, the monitor looks very much like the dull, drab prints that came out of the Epson using "Photoshop manages color." I decided to check back with Jim, since he seemed to understand Photoshop very well, and asked him about that. He thought that suggested that there was interference coming from ColorSync on the Mac -- somehow the ICC profile was not getting to the printer from Photoshop.
He suggested that I go to Edit: Convert to paper profile and choose the paper profile for the paper I'm using. Then in the first Print dialog box select Color Handling: No Color Management. All the other settings in the next dialog box are the same as what Epson recommends when you do not want the printer to manage colors (Print Settings: Mode: Advanced and Color Management: Off). NOW when I did a soft proof with "Preserve RGB" turned off, when I printed the GretagMacbeth Color Rendition Chart, what came out of the printer was extremely close to the soft proof. When I printed some of my photos of skies, that have a lot of blues, they were close, too, except the printer version had a touch less red. So I created an adjustment layer that pulled the red curve down slightly that I can use to see what the print will look like on Velvet Fine Art. I haven't tried this with other papers, yet, but I assume it's going to be similar.
You have no idea how thrilled I am that I can now move on and get some creative work done instead of wrestling with this problem. So if you are running Mac OS 10.4 and using Photoshop, calibrate your monitor to 5000K and give this a try. And let's hear it for a company that still offers customer service :-).
--Helen
