Topic: Printing Snow Leopard Epson 3800 and Dark Colours Fixed????? (Read 9485 times)

elolaugesen · « **on:** September 03, 2010, 05:20:31 pm »

Hi: I too have had numerous problems with dark prints using PSE 6 testing lightroom and trying to print with snow leopard. I therefore did all my work with Snow leopard and the printing on my old powerbook using 10.5.8 and driver 6.57.

I finally decided to see what the problem might be. I had tested CS5 back in my 10.5.8 days with leopard and did not find it gave me any features that I did not have with PSE6. Then PSE8 came out and Adobe had removed many of the nice printing features and made it useless for me. But I also wanted snow leopard and move on.

I borrowed a version of CS5, ran tests with OSX 10.6.4 epson 3800 driver 6.57(from the UK site) and applied the common updater 7.0 (from the us Epson site). Guess what? the colours using the same old ICC profiles are identical to the eye and my wife and artist with a perfect eye for colours could not see any difference. In fact she thinks the prints are clearer and better. (i used same unsharp procedures as before)
I have been testing the system for 3-4 days and it still works. none of the other programs work right only CS5???

I check by printer using a small purge page using all 8 colours every day to make sure colours are still ok.

cheers if anyone can explain? Maybe Adobe did it right?

lxxl · « **Reply #1 on:** September 04, 2010, 01:01:01 pm »

I don't think so. Maybe you are one of these lucky people, for whom the problem vanished into thin air, for whatever reason (though you said, that you have still problems with applications other than Photoshop CS5).
I've been troubled by wrong color rendering for a year now, when using the Epson Stylus Pro 3800 with Snow Leopard, and I couldn't find any solution yet. I've tried to print with the Adobe Creative Suite 3 and now after an update with CS5. Tried all available drivers, all guides for installation, Lloyd Chambers elaborations, of course. It's all the same. Colors appear muddled with a greenish cast. I've even tried, what you've done: combining the european driver 6.57 with the updater from the american site. No luck. So I cannot confirm your "fix". Maybe other users can. I'm frustrated by this completely botched situation. The only way to get decent colors is to leave color management to the driver. My preferred workflow—let the application deal with the color management and specify an appropriate output color profile—is broken. After this long time hope is zero, that Epson will ever provide a reliable 3800 driver for Snow Leopard. And no one can tell me, that this is not Epson's fault. I think, it is indeed a driver problem. Why there aren't such problems with the driver for the Epson Stylus Photo P50?

Besides, which way are you handling profiled printing? Color management by the application or by the driver?

Best regards,
Alex

elolaugesen · « **Reply #2 on:** September 05, 2010, 02:46:25 pm »

I let photoshop handle the colours... never ever the printer...

my own personal opinion.. gamma 2.2 versus 1.8 I have set all my screens to stay at 1.8 and as printing was always based on 1.8 I think CS5 is checking to see your gamma and then go with that.

secondly my screen calibration tool huey pro does not work with they generate 4.0 Icc profiles not the 2.xx required by snow leopard. O contacted Pantone they have now sent me three new systems all the same.. apple snow leopard 6.2.4 does not recognize 4.0 profiles..

make sure your profiles are 2.2 or thereabouts..

I am now guessing no proof.....!!!!

digitaldog · « **Reply #3 on:** September 05, 2010, 03:10:18 pm »

Quote from: elolaugesen on September 05, 2010, 02:46:25 pm

I let photoshop handle the colours... never ever the printer...

Which is how you should be printing. That said, there have been some users who have tried everything to make this work and in the end, letting Printer Manage Color was the only fix. Go figure. This entire mess is pretty difficult to nail down.

Quote

my own personal opinion.. gamma 2.2 versus 1.8 I have set all my screens to stay at 1.8 and as printing was always based on 1.8 I think CS5 is checking to see your gamma and then go with that.

The display gamma has no role in the print output. In fact, with a color managed app, it would make no difference if you calibrated to 1.8 or 2.2 (or anything else) visually expect perhaps for some banding as you move farther away from the native TRC gamma of the monitor.

Quote

secondly my screen calibration tool huey pro does not work with they generate 4.0 Icc profiles not the 2.xx required by snow leopard. O contacted Pantone they have now sent me three new systems all the same.. apple snow leopard 6.2.4 does not recognize 4.0 profiles..

The huey is better than no instrument but not by much. IOW, its not a great product. 4.0 ICC profiles are still not ready for prime time. Its not the ICC or the 4.0 spec but software that interfaces with them that are kind of broken. Version 2.0 profiles for the time being are what the software products should default to. At the pace of color management, maybe in 5-6 years, we can work with 4.0 profiles without ill effect.

briphoto · « **Reply #4 on:** September 07, 2010, 08:39:08 am »

I'm one of the unlucky ones also and I'm printing from Photoshop CS3. Everything was working fine until I went to Snow Leopard and updated my epson 3800 drivers a few weeks ago. Printer test targets that I use to compare papers show my prints are significantly darker now than they were before the upgrade. I may have to put an old Mac G4 I have with Tiger into service as my computer to print from.
Brian

Jeff Magidson · « **Reply #5 on:** September 07, 2010, 01:27:16 pm »

briphoto;

I have been down the same road ( Epson 3800, CS3, Tiger upgrade to Snow Leopard = dark prints ). The only solution I have found is to upgrade to PS CS5 ( you can download a 30 day free trial from Adobe ). Printing from CS5 in Snow Leopard will give you prints with the exact density that you where getting from CS3 and Tiger. Its kind of a shame that the only fix out there costs $200 but maybe the new features of PS CS5 will make it worth it in the long run.

best,

-Jeff

Quote from: briphoto on September 07, 2010, 08:39:08 am

I'm one of the unlucky ones also and I'm printing from Photoshop CS3. Everything was working fine until I went to Snow Leopard and updated my epson 3800 drivers a few weeks ago. Printer test targets that I use to compare papers show my prints are significantly darker now than they were before the upgrade. I may have to put an old Mac G4 I have with Tiger into service as my computer to print from.
Brian

briphoto · « **Reply #6 on:** September 07, 2010, 02:36:15 pm »

Jeff, I've been thinking about doing that. Problem is the computer I have at home has CS3 on it which was installed by my employer when I used to do some work at home for them. Now they outsource this work. I got to keep the software but I would have to pay for a CS5 upgrade when all I need is photoshop, not indesign and illustrator. I'll probably download the demo to see if that fixes it and then decide my course of action.

lxxl · « **Reply #7 on:** September 09, 2010, 10:18:05 am »

One thing I'm curious about is, that many people have problems first and foremost with dark prints or the inability to print out calibration charts. My problem is, that even if I have a profile, that should be working under normal conditions, I get not darker, but simply wrong colors when the application (in my case Photoshop CS5) handles the color management. Although there are plenty hints, how to deinstall/reinstall the Epson driver properly, I never managed to do so.
My question is: Is there anybody (besides of elolaugesen), who is using the European driver 6.57 and getting accurate prints on Snow Leopard (with color management handled by the application, of course)?

Jeremy Roussak · « **Reply #8 on:** September 09, 2010, 12:21:19 pm »

Quote from: lxxl on September 09, 2010, 10:18:05 am

My question is: Is there anybody (besides of elolaugesen), who is using the European driver 6.57 and getting accurate prints on Snow Leopard (with color management handled by the application, of course)?

Me.

Jeremy

lxxl · « **Reply #9 on:** September 09, 2010, 01:20:16 pm »

Hello Jeremy, could you give me some information about your hardware. And which application are you printing with? And then, how did you manage to install the driver properly? Any special procedure or did it immediately work?

madmanchan · « **Reply #10 on:** September 09, 2010, 01:28:32 pm »

My approach was to visit the System Preferences and completely remove the printer entry from the Print & Fax panel (clicked the little minus button). Then I downloaded the latest driver from the Epson USA site and installed from scratch. I can then print profile targets and regular images.

The forthcoming Adobe profile target printing utility will be another way to print targets (without PS).

Wayne Fox · « **Reply #11 on:** September 09, 2010, 01:43:37 pm »

Quote from: madmanchan on September 09, 2010, 01:28:32 pm

My approach was to visit the System Preferences and completely remove the printer entry from the Print & Fax panel (clicked the little minus button). Then I downloaded the latest driver from the Epson USA site and installed from scratch. I can then print profile targets and regular images.

In a couple of extreme cases helping people with this, I've gone a little further by completely removing all traces of the current Epson drivers, then doing a reset of the Mac's printing system, followed by reinstalling the driver. ( I did a little write up about the procedure which as worked on a couple of extreme occasions where all else seemed to have failed. http://tinyurl.com/ybydkpg )

Personally my 3800 worked just fine from the day I started with Snow Leopard except for the known issue of printing targets from CS4 which has actually been around since OS X 10.5 and I had long since found several work arounds, Erics being the most reliable and simplest. If I recall, the latest epson driver and OS X 10.6.3 seems to have resolved the problem with Snow Leopard and printing of targets.

lxxl · « **Reply #12 on:** September 09, 2010, 04:54:56 pm »

Unfortunately I did all these proceedings severall times to no avail. $:-\$ Besides, the first install of the driver was on a clean new Snow Leopard install each time, one time on an iMac and then on my MacBook Pro. There were no previous OS X installs on these machines.
The only thing, that's new to me is to check out in the ColorSync Utility, if there are really no printers registered anymore. So I'm going to have another round to get assurance about this. Maybe I should ask the other way round: Who is in the same situation like me?

Wayne Fox · « **Reply #13 on:** September 09, 2010, 06:14:50 pm »

Quote from: lxxl on September 09, 2010, 04:54:56 pm

Unfortunately I did all these proceedings severall times to no avail. $:-\$ Besides, the first install of the driver was on a clean new Snow Leopard install each time, one time on an iMac and then on my MacBook Pro. There were no previous OS X installs on these machines.

Of course the OS can be installing Epson drivers, some older ones which conflict with current ones. There are several issues if you are trying to print to an old Epson and a newer one with some work arounds.

Hopefully a printer system reset will help.

lxxl · « **Reply #14 on:** September 09, 2010, 06:53:12 pm »

Well, as I mentioned before, I've done the whole shebang including resetting the printing system and wiping any printer driver from the harddrive. I followed a guide that I found on an Epson support site, which was in fact for another printer, but should be the same in principle (http://www.epson.co.uk/Printers-and-All-In-Ones/Large-Format/Epson-Stylus-Pro-GS6000/Drivers-Support?target=article&extn=.html&articleId=1975).

elolaugesen · « **Reply #15 on:** September 10, 2010, 01:03:21 pm »

follow up:

All prints are still working fine. Colours are the same ... I daily (when I print) print my 8 colour purge chart using the same paper same settings and my expert to tell me colours are the same as the old 10.5.8 with PSE6. and her favourite painting with all the colours in the world.

The solution after reading all of your comments must be CS5. none of my other tools work properly withe 10.6 nor did my original test with CS4, lightroom 2 or PSE6. My screen calibrator still does not work....ICC profile version 4! xrite/pantone keeps sending me a new one....no difference..(I now have 4 calibrators.....)

Adobe UK have a special for all PSE users 50% off for CS5 photoshop. until Sept 13. Wonder why?

I will delete my borrowed versionof CS5 and buy CS5. I have been in this computer business for a long time and have always paid my way. this is a hard one to swallow though. PSE is all I need but to get colours right I must buy CS5!!!!!! adobe Steve Jobs was right adobe get to work.....

to summarize : 10.5.4 epson 3800 Uk driver 6.57 with the US Common updater 7.0(who knows what effect it had)
I did not delete all epson folders/software. I did a snow leopard install on top of leopard. deleted my epson driver downloaded a new driver applied 7.0 and then set up the printer. result lousy colours for everything but CS5.

WHO KNOWS....

cheers to you all

lxxl · « **Reply #16 on:** September 12, 2010, 09:47:07 am »

By the way, I've been recently told by an Epson support technican never to install a driver from the American support site for an European Epson Printer, because the hardware and inks would differ. Different hardware and inks for the same printer modell across the countries, is that true?

Though the last driver, I've been struggling with, was version 6.57 anyway, I cleaned my system from any printer drivers once more yesterday (including resetting the printing system). Did also the check with the ColorSync utility. There are no registered printers anymore. However, to check out, if there is any pleasing difference, I have to wait for tomorrow. It's annoying, because it seems, as if I'm wasting more ink for switching the printer on and off and testing than for actually printing.
Elolaugensen, I'm wondering if it is up to Adobe to do this or that, when you say yourself, that the driver is not working with anything else than Photoshop CS5? I'd say, the driver is not really working then.
I'd like to know a little more about Jeremy's experience. His comment was a bit brief. And Eric, I guess your printer is an American modell, isn't it? If I believed in the statement of the Epson technican, the American driver (version 6.11 + Common Updater 7.0) cannot be a solution for European Epson printers. Although, my experience was, that the results showed no differences to the European driver 6.57 at all—meaning the same wrong colors in my case.

lxxl · « **Reply #17 on:** September 13, 2010, 10:26:41 am »

No luck. Colors are still wrong.

Regarding the assertion of differences of American and European inks, I couldn't find any evidence for this. In fact, they are both K3 Ultrachrome inks, they have the same color names, they even share the same product numbers.

Doyle Yoder · « **Reply #18 on:** September 13, 2010, 01:43:48 pm »

If there are no registered printers anymore in the ColorSync Utility then your install or adding printer failed. It is highly unlikely you will get correct color with a printer not registered with ColorSync.

I would reset the printing system and try to add printer back in. If it still does not register, I would reset printing system, delete Library/Printers/Epson folder, delete ColorSync cache and preferences, and reboot. Now reinstall the Epson printer driver and then add the Epson driver in Print & Fax. Make sure you are not adding the CUPS/Gimp driver that comes with the OS.

lxxl · « **Reply #19 on:** September 13, 2010, 02:29:14 pm »

This is a misunderstanding. I just made sure, that all registered printers were gone after the deinstallation procedure. Then I reinstalled the Epson driver and the printer registered just fine. That's not the problem.
Just to give you an idea, what I mean with wrong colors, please check out the attached image. It's a scan from a print on Epson Archival Matte Paper with the according Epson color profile. The top image is printed via driver color management. The bottom image is what I get, when printing with the application (Photoshop) handling the color management (CM turned off in driver settings).

Author Topic: Printing Snow Leopard Epson 3800 and Dark Colours Fixed????? (Read 9485 times)