Blocked Shadows

[ippolitois]

I've always had blocked shadows and what looks like excess ink in the blacks. I have had profiles made for me and now I'm making them myself with my Spyder3print. I'm able to open up the shadows by decreasing the contrast and brightening the shadows. I thought it was my Epson 4000, but I had someone print it on a 4800 with the same effect so I think it's not the printer.

I've been reading that this seems to be a common problem with these printers. Does anyone have any ideas or techniques to minimize or eliminate this problem?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Paul 

[Schewe]

What paper? Matte or watercolor will tend to block up the shadows requiring the lightening of those tones in order to get a good print. Are you doing soft proofing? That will predict how blocked up the shadows will be...

[ippolitois]

Hi Jeff,

I forgot to mention that I print on Micro Luster (Red River, Inkpress and IJA) about 99% of the time. All three yield the same results. I'm about to get some Canson Baryta for personal stuff. Also, yes I'm softproofing too. The on screen image looks like it has smooth transitions but they render blocked in the print. I have to really look really hard to see the possible areas of concern and then lighten them up. Screen to print color is very good. I have the Dell 3009 Adobe RGB wide gamut screen. The Spyder 3 tells me that the screen is near perfect Adobe RGB.

Thanks for asking.

Regards,

Paul

[Sven W]

If you are on Mac, download and demo-print with ImagePrint. I'm sure you will get decent shadows,
because it's a typical older Epson driver problem with blocked shadows. To much ink. (With the x900 series you don't see so much of it)


/Sven

Ps The Win-version of IP don''t support demo-printing.

[Aristoc]

General question here. If shadows appear too 'blocked  up', is it possible to reduce the amount of ink layed down in the shadows?

[ippolitois]

If you are on Mac, download and demo-print with ImagePrint. I'm sure you will get decent shadows,
because it's a typical older Epson driver problem with blocked shadows. To much ink. (With the x900 series you don't see so much of it)


/Sven

Ps The Win-version of IP don''t support demo-printing.

Hi Sven,

Well I didn't realize that the older Epson drivers had this potential problem. That seems to answer a lot of the mystery surrounding this issue. What started all this was that  I printed a BW with the Epson driver and then the same print with the Quad RIP software and saw a HUGE difference in the shadows and I mean night and day. I realized then that it might be the driver and not the printer but wasn't totally sure.

Since then, I have purchased a copy of IP7 and I'm waiting for it to arrive. It sounds like this might resolve some of my printing issues. Thanks for the info with respect to IP.

Let's say I don't have IP and still want to recover the details in the shadows, what techniques are employed to get the best out of the existing Epson driver for printers other than the 49xx series? I would still like to know what the experts do to resolve these issues.

Thanks in advance.

Paul

[Sven W]

Two tips:
With ImagePrint I control shadows with the "Adjust black point" slider. Common settings are 0 (zero) for Perceptual rendering with
glossy papers and 20 for matte. Always Perceptual with B&W (one-channel GG 2.2).
Color images the same for Perceptual, but sometimes I render with Relative, and use then 50 for glossy and 70 for matte papers.
(It all depends on the image content, of course)

When printing with the driver  , you can quite easy make a very fine luminance mask for shadows and subtle bring them up.
If you find it to complicated, contact me off-line, and I will send you some nice macros for shadow, midtone and highlight masks.

/Sven

[neile]

Sven, can you elaborate a bit on your "always perceptual with B&W" comment? I haven't heard that one before. Thanks!

Neil

[ippolitois]

Two tips:

When printing with the driver   , you can quite easy make a very fine luminance mask for shadows and subtle bring them up.
If you find it to complicated, contact me off-line, and I will send you some nice macros for shadow, midtone and highlight masks.

/Sven

Hi Sven,

Thanks for the tips and help. Could you please explain  "luminance mask" concept. I would really like to understand this methodology.

Thanks in advance.

Paul

[Sven W]

Sven, can you elaborate a bit on your "always perceptual with B&W" comment? I haven't heard that one before. Thanks!

Neil

I get the most out of the image, esp. shadows, with Perceptual. It can sometimes look a little soft and a bit low contrast, but I prefer
that over harsh and high contrast. And it looks closer comparing to the actual image on my monitor.
Talking about fiddling with IP's ABP-slider; according to the icc-standard it shouldn't affect the black point with Perceptual, but it does.
It's more like a gamma adjustment. And when I tested for maximum black, there where more strange results.
Color on matte papers gives the max black with Perc/0. You can never achieve the same with Rel. On glossy papers, smaller difference.
It's the same type of difference on B&W, but hardly visible.
ColorByte claim that their profiles are all build only for Perceptual.
/Sven

[terrywyse]

I've always had blocked shadows and what looks like excess ink in the blacks.

If you're using a 3rd party media, you should test and make profiles using different media types and see what performs best. Myself, I never assume the paper vendor's recommendation is "gospel" as far as media setting but will always profile 3-4 media settings that I think are appropriate and then use ColorThink Pro to tell me which is "the best". Gamut volume, gamut boundaries and Dmax (L*min) are a few of the metrics I check out. It's also helpful to view the primary/secondary ink channels in 2D and 3D plots and look for even tonal distribution.

As far as rendering intents, for good photo papers such as Ilford Gold Fiber Silk and others, relative colorimetric + BPC or perceptual should be fine....if you're using matte "fine art" papers along with matte black ink, generally you'll need to stick with perceptual to avoid severe gamut clipping.

Terry

[Schewe]

Could you please explain  "luminance mask" concept. I would really like to understand this methodology.

If you Command click (or Control click for PC) the RGB composite channel, you'll load the luminosity of the image as a selection. Save the selection and you'll get a luminance based channel where the highlights are light and the shadows are dark. Command I (or Control) to invert the channel and you'll have a negative channel where when loading will have the shadows being selected...you can then use this as a layer mask so that adjustments to the image (like and adjustment layer) will be targeted at the shadows and not the highlights.

A quite and easy solution to lightening the shadows is to take an adjustment layer with the negative of the luminance mask as the layer mask and set the layer blending options to Screen. This procedural blend will lighten the shadows a lot...so you'll want to bring the opacity of this layer down a lot...I often do this at 5% or 10% opacities to lighten the shadows a touch prior to printing out on matte based papers. If the inverted mask and Screen layer hurts some areas of the image, you can simply paint the effect away in the mask.

[ippolitois]

If you're using a 3rd party media, you should test and make profiles using different media types and see what performs best. Myself, I never assume the paper vendor's recommendation is "gospel" as far as media setting but will always profile 3-4 media settings that I think are appropriate and then use ColorThink Pro to tell me which is "the best". Gamut volume, gamut boundaries and Dmax (L*min) are a few of the metrics I check out. It's also helpful to view the primary/secondary ink channels in 2D and 3D plots and look for even tonal distribution.

Terry

Hi Terry,

I think I almost understood all that. I did try many variations, consumming forests of trees and many milliliters of ink to try and resolve this issue of blockage. I even had two other "professional" sources profile the printer and they both produced the same thing. In desperation I purchased the Spyder Elite kit and it produced the same thing as the other two. I then continued my deforestation  program with many more milliliters of ink and managed to produce a profile that 90% of the time worked and it worked with all my Luster papers. The irony is that the canned Epson profiles seem to have all the blockage dialed out but they don't work with my favorite papers. I can only conclude that Epson was aware of this issue as so many people here are aware of it too.

Is there a simpler solution to this issue? Is there a tool or tools that can analyze the data gathered from the specto readings and dial out something like the excessive ink in the shadows? I only ask this so that perhaps others may benefit. Personally, I'm counting on IP7 to save me.  Unfortunately, my interest in this is to hit the print button, and get a good print. This endeavor seems a little more perplexing than I thought. My only failing is I flunked science or I might have had a fighting chance.

Thanks in advance.

Paul

[ippolitois]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the technique. It seems to work better that just a layer mask alone.

Regards,

Paul