Epson P800 + Ultra Premium Luster - bad canned profile?

[Joel Haskell]

I use my P800 mostly for B/W work. But I make a few color prints each year on Epson Ultra Premium Luster, and the skin tones kill me. They lack warmth and look pinkish – but without the huge magenta shift that you see with certain color management mishaps. For years I ran an effective color managed workflow and got accurate color from my 2200. However, with the P800, the color disappointments are unrelenting.

Today I got annoyed and tossed in a sheet of Canson Baryta Prestige and used Canson’s P800 profile: it looked AMAZING (ie. It looked like it's supposed to look.) So then for kicks, I threw in a sheet of Epson Luster but I used the same (now incorrect) Canson profile, and it STILL looked way better than the usual. As soon as I switched back to the Epson profile + Epson paper it reverted to its normal terrible look. The Epson paper/profile combination is 100% repeatable; it has never NOT happened, despite many years of OS updates, printer re-installs, and color management fussing.

Is it possible that a particular canned Epson profile could be THAT bad? I once paid for custom profiles on my 2880 and they didn’t improve the skin tones, but maybe I should give custom profiles another try?

I’d love to hear people’s experiences using the P800’s canned profiles with Epson glossy/luster papers, particularly if you use it for color portraits of any kind.

Thanks!

[digitaldog]

You may want to watch this:
Not all ICC profiles are created equally

In this 23 minute video, I'll cover:
The basic anatomy of ICC Profiles
Why there are differences in profile quality and color rendering
How to evaluate an ICC output profile
Examples of good and not so good canned profiles and custom profiles on actual printed output.

High resolution: http://digitaldog.net/files/Not_All_Profiles_are_created_equally.mp4
Low resolution (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNdR_tIFMME&feature=youtu.be

Or just the bit about Epson's two kinds of profiles (those with and without V2 in the name). The SC-P800 Series Ultra Premium Photo Paper Luster.icc isn't one of the preferred profiles so it might be that.

You should always test output using good color reference images designed for that task. The color reference images RGB values are such that they are set for output and are editing and display agnostic. Test the output this way and examine for the same color issues so we know it's not your image-specific issues causing the problems:
http://www.digitaldog.net/files/2014PrinterTestFileFlat.tif.zip
This and other such documents can also be downloaded at http://www.digitaldog.net/

[unesco]

it is that bad. pinkish + ultra premium luster has tons of optical whiteners and has cool tone by itself (probably more than mentioned baryta), but with well made manual profile it can be quite good at P800

[MichaelKoerner]

Same experience here - Epson Premium Lustre on P800 needs custom made profile (or manual correction curve with regard to warmth before printing).