Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Printing: Printers, Papers and Inks => Topic started by: daveao on December 25, 2010, 01:25:47 pm
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I know some of you have been down this ugly path in the past and may be able to give me a formula to save me some time and money. I have already wasted a good portion of a 44" roll of Epson Premium Satin Canvas on prints that are coming out too short to work on my canvas wraps.
I am working with an Epson 9900 and want prints with lengths in the 48" to 60" range. All of my prints are coming out short from my desired running length. Have any of you come up with a formula for compensating for this issue? I am looking for a paper feed adjustment setting or a multiplier that I can use when setting the print length in the print set up.
Thanks in advance! Dave
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Your doing something wrong as we print over 90" all of the time.
Mac - Lightroom
Page setup
paper size
manage custom size
page size - width _____ Heigth_____.
Fill in those 2 blanks and print.
If your coming up just a litlle short say a half inch just add another inch to your canvas length.
I never cut it that close anyway. Usually an 1 1/2" of unprinted canvas at both sides and ends for stretching.
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Oh, that. For some reason all my canvases come out of my 9880 by about 1/16 inch short per 14 inches, same as my previous printer. So an 8 foot print comes out about 7/16" short. Always. There's a way to change some parameter somewhere in the printer setup screen, but I just size things accordingly before printing.
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Oops,my apologies. I thought you could not get prints to the above mentioned 40" or 60" lengths.
If thats not the case and you are just a fraction short I would just do as Bill and probably most others do just add some more material to your custom length.
Someone here may know how to go in and fine tune that dimension.
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There may be shrinkage after printing on canvas---after coating the canvas--- which is actually caused by water in the coating on poly-cotton canvas. My canvas prints come out of the printer to their exact dimensions. The size changes only after coating. I call it the Seinfeld "George Castanza" effect ("It was the pool! It was the pool!"). I have noticed that print shrinkage is more apparent running the length of the canvas (as opposed to across the roll). The formula I have been given to counter this is to increase the dimension of the length only by 1.25%. After coating shrinkage, you should be pretty close to the right length.
ken
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I've just started working with Breathing Color Lyve. On a 20" print I have to scale the image 0.2" longer (e.g. 20.2" total) for it to come out as a 20" print. On a 10" print I have to add 0.1". Perhaps a 40" print would require 0.4" of compensation, but I'm not sure yet if this is linear. That is before coating.
The canvas shrinks along its length when I print on it. It's width however, remained the same.
I imagine that trial and error is required to determine what kind of correction you have to do for you paper / printer combination.
Terry.
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I've just started working with Breathing Color Lyve. On a 20" print I have to scale the image 0.2" longer (e.g. 20.2" total) for it to come out as a 20" print. On a 10" print I have to add 0.1". Perhaps a 40" print would require 0.4" of compensation, but I'm not sure yet if this is linear. That is before coating.
The canvas shrinks along its length when I print on it. It's width however, remained the same.
I imagine that trial and error is required to determine what kind of correction you have to do for you paper / printer combination.
Terry.
Terry, is this just with your canvas, or does this happen when you print on paper as well? If it happens on paper as well, it could be that paper feed adjustments need to be made on the control panel, bering in mind that this will also effect the resultant ink coverage. I had an issue where my prints on my Epson 9800 were short and my shadow areas were becoming muddied - only marginally. I increased the paper feed adjustment (trial and error) so that the output size matched the requested size - presto - my shadow areas improved as well.
Julie
Julie
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Hi all,
I had suggested Dave come here with his problem after reading it on another forum.
I had replied and still have a lot of trouble understanding how the canvas can shrink only where the ink is applied and wetting the image area of the canvas without causing curling and puckering of the border areas that are not recieving Ink.
There would be a substantial differences in surface tension and the coefficient of contraction going on between the wet and dry areas!
If you take artist watercolor paper and wet it while painting in different degrees in different areas, it causes substantial curling and wavyness in the paper upon drying and I cannot fathom why the non inked edges of the canvas would not in fact do the same thing if shrinkage was involved due to wetting.
Funny I had thought of George Costanza and the pool also. ;-)
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I'm also printing on Breathing Color's Lyve Canvas on an Epson 9800. No shrinkage after printing. There is that slight *ahem* George Costanza effect after hvlp spraying with Glamour II. Shrinkage appears most noticeably along the length of the canvas. No Costanza effect on any other type of media---only spray sealed canvas. I've got a series of canvas prints to do this coming week, so I'll pay particular attention....
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Terry, is this just with your canvas, or does this happen when you print on paper as well?
This is just with canvas (Lyve). I measured a few cotton rag prints (matte and fiber based gloss) to double check and their dimensions are correct. I'm printing on a 3800.
Frankly, I thought this was common knowledge. In Michael's interview of Andrew Collett in Luminous Landscape Video Journal 19, viewers are cautioned by Andrew that canvas will shrink when printed. He explains that it will only shrink along the length; whereas the width will remain unchanged. He starts to explain this at 31:40.
Based on Andrews comments I made a 20" long print and measured it. Indeed, it was shorter when printed than it was in Photoshop. I made a second 20" print but this time I resized it to 20.2". The print came out to exactly 20". All of this was before any coating was applied.
Terry.
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I'm gallery wrapping my canvas. The main image I run with a blurry edge that blends into the wrap part of the image. Since the frames I'm using have some variability, combined with the blended edge and stretching, for my work it doesn't matter much.
Other canvas gets dry mounted and framed so a little off on the "exact" length doesn't matter.
The art of printing is a lot like building a house where you get it pretty close then tweak the image with the framing an presentation of the ready-to-hang artwork, IMO.
In all reality, these little things drive us nuts, but for everyone else, it's of little consequence in the scheme of things...
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Hello All,
I generally spend much of my "forum browsing" time on the "EpsonWideFormat" group, however, I have found this to be a very informative area as well. So for what it's worth, I'll add my 2.5¢(after inflation). A few years ago when I first started printing on canvas with my SP7600 I too was inflicted with the dreaded "canvas shrinkage" problem. On the aforementioned forum there were a number of "fixes" posted, none of which I found to be terribly effective. At that time I was using Premier Art Canvas, so after perusing their website I found an answer that seemed to be a natural solution. It was indeed a Paper Feed Adjustment to accommodate for the thickness and other particular properties of canvas. Of course the posted adjustment required some tweaking, but within 2 or 3 tests I had it nailed down. I still use the 7600 for the occasional B&W job, since QTR is not available for the 9900. This problem reared its ugly head again when I started canvas printing on the 9900, so back to the forum. With the 9900 and the Leopard(Mac) driver the Paper Feed Adjustment made no difference at all. As a matter of fact it seemed that the adjustment was not meant to be altered by the user in the Mac driver. An assumption that was quickly substantiated on the forum. So again I was relegated to adding dimension to the image in order to get the size required when printing on canvas. This was NOT what I wanted at all, so one day as I was about to print another canvas I decided to try a different approach, obviously one that I should have used from the beginning. On the 9900 printer control panel I went to Paper Type>Fine Art Papers and scrolled down to Canvas. That's the only thing I did differently from previous attempts and it worked perfectly. All of my other driver settings are the same, and as long as I remember to set this on the control panel the "length" dimension of the image is "EXACT"! No more fiddling around with adding canvas dimension or any of the other "band aid" fixes. Other than the fact that the Paper Feed Adjustment seems to have absolutely no effect on the 9900 with the Mac driver, it would appear that Epson has definitely got it right this time and has built in the proper feed adjustment for canvas. I posted this on the "other" forum and have had excellent response from those who have tried it.
I use the Eco Print Shield coatings from Premier Imaging(aqueous based) and never have a problem with "actual" shrinkage either. Obviously I cannot comment on other aqueous based products.
I hope this is of some help.
Gary
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One more aspect that I forgot to mention, if you will indulge me one more time. It is my "firm" belief that there is no such thing as canvas shrinkage during printing. It is assumed that since the inks are indeed aqueous based, and canvas is a fabric, this "fabric can shrink during printing due to the application of a water based substance, INK. Well if that were true, it seems reasonable that the canvas would "shrink" ONLY where that ink has been applied. You may disagree with this reasoning, but I believe it to be sound. So if we apply this form of reasoning to the problem at hand and if the printed area is less that the overall width of the canvas, would it not hold true that only the inked(printed) area would exhibit this so called shrinkage? Now if that were the case, the unprinted edges of the canvas would exhibit a wrinkled or rippling effect, since the printed area and its accompanying"shrinkage" would then be applying a certain degree of pressure on the unprinted edges. Example: take a piece of Kraft paper and moisten the inner portion of the sheet, leaving a couple of inches of border area dry. What you will notice is that the centre(moistened) area has indeed lost some of its dimensional stability, therefore putting stress on the dry borders, causing the border areas to wrinkle in an abnormal and somewhat irregular fashion once the centre has dried. I will admit that I have seen this happen to some extent after coating the canvas with an aqueous based product, but it has never affected the overall length of the image and will always dry back to its pre-coating state. This has been my experience with the canvases I have used; Premier Art, two Hahnemülle canvas products and presently Breathing Color Chromata White.
Gary
PS: As I was going back over some of the posts in this thread I noticed the one from 'davidh202' that is very much along the
same line as this one, so please forgive me for rehashing this issue. Suffice to say that I definitely agree with Davids
reasoning and the most eloquent manner in which he states his position on this subject. Somehow I missed his post the
first time through.
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Gary,
I just read your new reply as I was typing this. and I had posed that very question about different shrinkage rates from the very begining both here and on the other forum.It doesn't hold up as far as my logic is concerned. My earlier post....
"If you take artist watercolor paper and wet it while painting in different degrees in different areas, it causes substantial curling and wavyness in the paper upon drying and I cannot fathom why the non inked edges of the canvas would not in fact do the same thing if shrinkage was involved due to wetting".
I had replied to Dave that I also have been setting the 7900 printer control panel to the 'canvas' setting and have never experienced any problems. I am also printing from Qimage.
Dave said he had indeed tried the Canvas setting with no solution to his problem.?
It really does make logical sense that since the width of the canvas is a fixed value and mostly all have no problem with the width outcome, that it is indeed a problem related to feed or the physical measurement of the canvas in the length calculation by whatever mechanism does that calculation since that is the significant variable in the equation.
It is quite possible the fact that the physical travel of the head is from side to side leads to better accuracy where in the length it can be miscalculated,Consequently, the longer the print is the more exaggerated the miscalculation is.
I am too new at this to know whether or not the size calculations are strictly done by counting pixels laid down or if there is a laser or some such device in the head of these printers that measures the travel of the head over the paper (canvas) to do the size calc.
If it is indeed a laser device,and canvas has a very rough texture, could it be reading the peaks and valleys of the canvas surface which would add up to a greater overall distance, and thus shortening the actual print length "as the crow flies" so to speak?
In the width measurement (usually narrow) it wouldn't be noticable, but in the length it would add up significantly over a longer distance.
David
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Gary,
I think were playing post tag ::) ;)
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Hi Gary. Thanks very much for your posting of print length on the 9900. If I am hearing you correctly, you took all of your print setups on the MAC back to normal with no "paper feed adjustments" (kept at 0). Then you just went onto the 9900's control panel and select canvas under "paper type". As far as I know I have had this selection on my printer all along and have still had "short" prints. I was just getting ready to head down a path of recalculating print lengths and going that route but now you have me intrigued as I want to make prints without having to set longer print sizes. Any other words of wisdom here on this topic with you 9900? I think I just need to try some more and carefully record every setting and then watch and document the results.
Regards, Dave
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Hi Dave!
I'm glad you showed up here but apparantly there is still much debate as to the actual answer. humm
I really wish that one of the printer engineers would reply and give us the real truth.
I can just picture all of them sitting around a conference table laughing their arses off and saying...
"Lets keep em all in the dark,look at all the money we make on consumables with all these people having to do all this calibration and testing"
;)
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I'm sure everyone here is familiar with the issue of lens-body AF focus accuracy and calibration in DSLRs.
A similar analogy...
My belief is the feed mechanisms of various printers,and even printers of the same manufacturer and model can differ to some degree (especially ones with vacuum hold downs), and cause variables in the paper feeding and length even if the correct recommended media settings are made in the driver. As with AF fine tuning I think this may be a necessary evil to set accuracy in an individual printer if there are discrepancies.
That is probably why platten and vacuum setting choices are there to begin with and "custom settings" can be saved.
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Hi Dave,
Yes, that's correct, the PF Adjustment is set to "0", as on the Mac it seems to serve NO purpose, which has been substantiated on several occasions on another forum. I don't now if this is true on a PC, but on the Mac no PF Adjustment has any affect at all. Perhaps this has been fixed in 10.6, but I don't believe so.
I'll be back to work tomorrow and will check all of my driver settings again and send them along. I use Epson Enhanced Matte Paper for testing the images to be printed on Canvas and I have a "correction factor" that I apply once I'm happy with the results on the paper. Obviously canvas is rather costly to be using for testing. I do know that my media type setting in the driver is Canvas and of course I then set the Paper Type on the control panel to Canvas as well, but I'll check it all again tomorrow and let you know what's working for me.
Gary
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If you want to test the PF feed function, you need to understand that its purpose is to deal with micro banding, with the emphasis being on micro.
Get some plain paper and print at 720x360 and then make some adjustments and you'll likely see the difference. It does help to provide adjustment for using third party media in particular where the thickness, for example, doesn't quite match the driver choice enough.
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Thanks Gary. I will look forward to hearing your settings. Dave
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There have been many discussions on what causes the length differences when printing on canvas. It could be the tension lost of the fabric unwinding from the roll. It can be the difference of the transport axle's friction between heavy textured and smooth surfaces. It can be the overall heavier weight of the media. Different printers and different canvas qualities will deliver a wide variety of print length differences.
The media transport length control in printers is usually of the servo type, a decoder disc (transparant disc with radial black lines + a Lamp + a counter, a similar but linear decoder strip is measuring the head carriage movement). It does not measure the actual media progress. Exceptions are the HP Z6100-6200 models that have a camera like sensor actually following the media's texture progress in transport.
To compensate the transport differences for more media some RIPs use a compensation build in the media presets, the same is done in media presets for normal drivers but not always. Customising them is possible but not in all cases. The best way then is a one directional resampling with a % suitable for a specific canvas. I have added a last step to my wrap actions for that purpose. Some applications have canvas wrap features but can not change aspect ratios/one directional resampling. If that still delivers a good length it could be that the media preset does have the right compensation without the user knowing what happens beneath the surface.
met vriendelijke groeten, Ernst Dinkla
Dinkla Gallery Canvas Wrap Actions for Photoshop
http://www.pigment-print.com/dinklacanvaswraps/index.html
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Hi Dave,
As I mentioned previously, I do use Enhanced Matte Paper for testing images to be printed on Canvas. I then add my correction factor from Enhanced Matte to Canvas and I use the Enhanced Matte Profile when I print the Canvas as well. However, in my Canvas Preset for the 9900 I have the Media Type set to Canvas and of course on the printer control panel the Paper Type is also set to Canvas. As Ernst has also mentioned, this may differ with other Canvas types, but for the Breathing Color Chromata White it works perfectly. I think perhaps Epson did actually build in some hardware/software compensation for Canvas with this printer. I hope this works for you Dave.
Gary
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Hi Gary. Forgive my ignorance but I am not sure I understand fully what you have just said. When you are testing your images on Enhanced Matte that will be eventually printed on canvas, what are you testing for? These tests don't have anything to do with the print length do they? You must be testing for image quality etc? 2nd question: Are you using an Enhanced Matte paper profile with canvas paper? I can't understand why you would do this.
If I am reading correctly it sounds like I may as well avoid the paper feed adjustments, set both my MAC and my 9900 for canvas prints, and then do a % calculation on the length until I get it right for my medium. Once I get it dialed in this % factor will work on any size paper of that medium. Does this sound correct? Dave
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Gary,
I'm confused ???How can you use the Enhanced Matte profile and Canvas setting at the same time in the driver?
If I am reading this correctly, (in the driver)you have essentially saved a custom paper configuration with a compensation factor built into the feed adjustment setting using the Enhanced Matte settings as a basis, and naming your saved preset "canvas"?
On the printer control panel you also have set the media to canvas.
That is not how I understood what you were doing from your initial post.
I thought you had said that you didn't need to make any mods to the driver. ?
I quote you,
"On the 9900 printer control panel I went to Paper Type>Fine Art Papers and scrolled down to Canvas. That's the only thing I did differently from previous attempts and it worked perfectly. All of my other driver settings are the same, and as long as I remember to set this on the control panel the "length" dimension of the image is "EXACT"! No more fiddling around with adding canvas dimension or any of the other "band aid" fixes. Other than the fact that the Paper Feed Adjustment seems to have absolutely no effect on the 9900 with the Mac driver"
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Hi Dave,
Here's a quote from your last post: "You must be testing for image quality etc?" You are 100% correct in your assumption. Testing image quality on canvas become very expensive. I've done a lot of work on this subject and I have found that the Enhanced Matte profile renders an almost exact match to the Canvas profile when actually printing on Canvas. There is a very slight correction factor that I use once I get the results I want on the Enhanced Matte. This correction of course is applied in Photoshop, since I print mostly from PS. Of course you must also know that I am printing on Matte Canvas. Obviously the Enhanced Matte profile would not work very well at all with a Gloss Canvas. In the printer driver you can of course choose whatever printer profile you want and then set the media type to something completely different. They are independent of one another. For example, when I print on Ilford Gallerie Smooth Pearl I use the Ilford printer profile but then I set the Media Type to Epson Premium Glossy, following Ilford's recommendation. Another example - when I first started printing on Canvas the manufacturer suggested using the Epson Watercolor Paper Radiant White profile, since they didn't yet have a profile of their own that I could download. So this procedure is certainly nothing new. In the printer driver I also create Presets for every paper type and situation. That way I don't have to go through all of the steps that are involved in the driver every time I make a print. The Paper or Canvas Preset contains all of that information. I don't know which App you are printing from, but if it is PS then Presets are a must as far as I'm concerned.
Now to address the fact that I do indeed test for image quality on EVERY image file I print. Just a little bit of history here. For more than 35 years I have been doing custom darkroom printing for a variety of photographers and certainly a variety of work. EACH AND EVERY "negative" had to be tested before a final print was made. Even then, there were often times when the full print showed areas that required more work, so back to the darkroom. Of course with digital it's a whole different ballgame, and I can say without any reservation that I do NOT miss the darkroom at all, EVER! However, I will also say that no matter how well my display is profiled and calibrated, there is no way that I would go straight to a final full sized print without testing a section of the image first. Wasting paper and ink is not my idea of efficiency or cost effectiveness. With a well calibrated display and the proper approach to soft proofing the number of tests can usually be reduced to one or two, but on more challenging images there's no guarantee.
Now I'll try to capsulize my comments somewhat, since I feel I might have muddied the waters previously by offering too much information. I have found that as long as I have set the Media Type in the driver to Canvas and the Paper Type on the printer control panel to Canvas I have never had a problem with image length. As a matter of fact, it's always about a 1/16" longer than the image size I have created in PS and I am NOT adding any % to the image length at all. Personally I think that's pretty close. Use whatever printer profile you wish, but as long as these two settings are correct you shouldn't have a problem. If this procedure doesn't work for you then it's my belief that you are doing something different in the driver or on the control panel.
And again, on the 9900 the Paper Feed Adjustment will NOT fix this problem! That did work with the 7600 and I believe one of the later models, but not on the 9900. This has been substantiated several times on other forums. I had tried that initially, but to no avail. At one point I had the setting up as far as +70 and it made absolutely no difference, so don't even bother with it. Leave it at "0" and use the driver and control panel settings I have already mentioned. They definitely do work!
Gary
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Thanks Gary. Very helpful. I will be re-looking very carefully at my setups to see where I may be missing something. Dave
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Just thought I would add our experience of this issue using an Epson 9900, Breathing Color canvas and printing through Qimage.
Printer control panel is set to "Canvas".
The profile for BC canvas recommends Media Type- Watercolour paper_Radiant White which we duly set. On a 110cm x 77cm image the canvas print length printed at 76cm.
Did a test on Enhanced Matte paper using exactly the same settings and the print length was 77cm.
Did a second test, on paper again, but this time changed Media Type to "Canvas". Print length came out at 78cm!
Therefore I assume that the 9900 driver introduces a compensation factor for canvas that is applied to the print length only. Which then implies that the issue is related to an inherent characteristic of canvas media.
Although BC recommended WC_RW as a "Media Type" setting for their canvas, in our case using a 9900 it was obviously advantageous to change this to "Canvas". We also could not discern any change in print quality with either "Media Type" setting.
No changes to Paper Feed Adjustment or any other driver settings.
As a previous post said - on a 9900 set "Canvas" for both Media Type and Printer Control Panel. Solved our issue. 8)
Pete
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That is great Pete. This was the solution I had really hoped for but was still getting inconsistent results and was wasting too much paper. I decided to just add 1.15% to my length setting with canvas and now seem to get the proper length. This is not an elegant solution but I am thrilled to get the length I desire so am not going to complain about it. In the future if I am asked to make a print where the length is not critical I may continue to experiment with the printer settings to see if I can stumble across the right settings but for now I am just doing a little math calculation and then re-setting the length in Photoshop.
Dave
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Thank you all for your helpful posts on this issue.
I've wasted a lot of canvas & ink producing prints that don't match my pre-made stretcher bars.
-evan