Printing Problems in Lightroom 4 & 5

[Will Furman]

Has anybody else been have huge printing software problems with LR4, and now, LR5? 

I have spent more than 40 HOURS during the last 6-1/2 months talking with Adobe Customer Service for Lightroom (their offices in India), with only temporary, intermittent fixes, at best.  The issues were been escalated to Level 2 Support, and then Level 3, with no answer or solution found after weeks of trial and error with Adobe techs in control of my computer.  I print on a Epson 7890, and I reloaded printer drivers many times, whenever I erased, rebooted and reinstalled Lightroom software. The printer works fine printing from Photoshop CS6 and from LR4 on my old computer. 

To be able to print anything larger than 6" or 7" (on the short side) I finally had to offload all my files and programs to an external drive, erase and reformat my internal hard drive, and reimport all applications EXCEPT ALL Adobe apps.  I then had to reload new Adobe programs from the internet, after upgrading my iMac computer to Mavericks.  Everything printed fine, for a few weeks.  Then it started again.  Again, Adobe was linked to my computer on almost every call, and they were controlling what happened.

This week, I could not print an image larger than about 6-7/8" on one side and correct length on the other, with the image cropped at the 6-7/8",, along with the Page Background Color. I got through to a Level 2 Tech, and he figured out a temporary fix  by setting all the margins to "0" in the Printer Attributes, and the margins to "0" in the LR print module. On 17" paper it seemed to print fine, but when I switched to printing with a 10" roll, making a 6 x 9 image, it rolled out 20" of paper, instead of curing off at about 7" or 8" as I had set it up in both LR5 and the Printer Attributes (creating about 12"  of wasted paper on each print- expensive at 20-30 prints a week).   The same amount of paper (20") was used when I printed 9" x 13" images  (creating 6" of wasted paper on each print ).

Has anybody been having any remotely similar printing problems with LR5?    I love the LR software in working with the image, but if I can't print it easily, or consistently...?   Any solution suggestions, like using someone else's software to print with, would be most appreciated.  Would ImagePrint help?   It would be an expensive solution, but I am getting towards my wits end...

All suggestions appreciated.  Thanks!

Will

[PhotoEcosse]

I have printed from Lightroom 4 and 5 on a variety of Epson Printers without any problems whatsoever.

I can only guess that the problem lies with your computer or printer set-up rather than with Lightroom.

I notice that all your attempts to get support have been with Adobe. May I respectfully suggest that it might be worth approaching the Epson help desk to see if they can shed any light on the problem.

[wolfnowl]

There's also about a thousand years of printing expertise from the members here (myself certainly excluded). Perhaps if you post some screen shots of your workflow and the steps you take people can help you resolve your issue.

Mike.

[PeterAit]

From the problem computer can you print properly from any other programs or do you have the same problems? Try a free trial of QImage, for example. If the problem persists, then it seems that it is not LR but the Epson driver or hardware but something else. If it is only with LR - well, I dunno. There have been lots of posts here regarding printing problems with some newer Mac operating systems, could that be it (Windows guy here so don't really know).

[Mac Mahon]

Will

I too have had no problems with LR (any version), Epson 3880, and Mavericks.

But I always follow one of Andrew Rodney's pieces of wisdom:  Throw out the Apple installed Epson driver, and download the latest relevant driver from Epson.  Apparently those in the know are very suspicious about Apple's version of the Epson driver.

Ignore if you've already done that.

Otherwise, I can only repeat what others have suggested:  Some screen shots of your LR print settings and workflow might allow other helpful eyes onto your workflow.

Cheers

Tim