Help! Strange black stripe on print

[aaronleitz]

I have been proofing a series of photos and on one particular image file I get a solid black band/stripe printed across the bottom of the print. I'm printing on a Canon 4100 using PP&L software. The black band happens no matter the paper type or size of the print.

The black band scales in size depending on the size of the print which makes me think it's something hidden in the file. I've checked the "channels" in Photoshop and there is nothing but the RGB channels. The photo is a single shot - no compositing or layers besides curves adj layers.

The black band does not show up on screen in the psd file or flattened tiff. I almost didn't notice it in the first small proof I did. When I put the image into Canon PP&L to print the main image preview looks normal. Down below the main preview in the slot queue the black band does show up in the smaller thumbnail of the image. See attachments.

All of the other photos in the series - all taken in the same way and processed the same way - print out fine.

This is driving me crazy. Is there some layer/channel in Photoshop that I'm missing?

[degrub]

Just a guess, are there enough pixels to cover the canvas ( i forget what it is called in PS) ?

[dgberg]

Just guessing, maybe a poor crop. Have you tried just cropping it off then printing.

[Kyle Jackson]

Not familiar with that printer/software but those would be my guesses too.

It's like the image is smaller than the specified print area size, so it's printing the image at the top of that area and filling the empty excess at the bottom with black.

But that would be really weird tho if true. My setup simply leaves the excess print area blank.

Maybe your software has an option that fills the blank space with black? And also to centre (or not) the image in the print area? I'd check there.

[aaronleitz]

Thank you for all of the responses!

The black stripe is covering part of the bottom of the image so it's not an additional blank space that is being filled in. All of the images in this series are squares, so I can drop in another image into the same slot without changing any print settings or slot size, and that image will print fine.

I'm going to re-process the image from the original raw file today and see if that fixes it. Maybe something in the file is corrupt...

[Kyle Jackson]

The black stripe is covering part of the bottom of the image so it's not an additional blank space that is being filled in. All of the images in this series are squares, so I can drop in another image into the same slot without changing any print settings or slot size, and that image will print fine.

I'm going to re-process the image from the original raw file today and see if that fixes it. Maybe something in the file is corrupt...

Oh ok, yeah that's weird. If it's only that image, and/or if it prints fine from something else (Photoshop, etc), then yeah maybe it's a malformed file at the end.

[aaronleitz]

Update as I know everyone was on the edge of their seats ;-)....

Lightroom's "Enhance super resolution" upscaling caused the black bar. I don't know how and I don't know why it only showed up in the CPP&L preview and not anywhere else but there you have it. I have used the enhance feature on dozens of other images just like this one and they remain unaffected.