Strange iPF 5100 Color Shift Problem
Before I shut down my iPf 5100 last June it printed perfect color and totally neutral black and whites on both Ilford Gold Fiber Silk and Harman FB Al papers using custom profiles supplied by ColorHQ.
When I resumed printing in September I did a nozzle check and ran a cleaning cycle and all was well until I brought up the image in the 16 bit pluginn in CS3 on my Mac Pro running OS 10.5.7. A red/ magenta cast was clearly evident in the plugin preview and the resulting print reflected this cast, compared to what I saw in Photoshop (which was neutral) through my calibrated monitor. A B+W image plugin preview had the same cast, and the print reflected this cast. To compensate within the print driver required the following changes to the Color Settings:
Cyan +6
Magenta -6 to -9
Yellow -6
Brightness -5
Contrast +5
Saturation +5
Gray Adj -18.
This "kludge" produced colors that closely matched the Photoshop image in both color and also gave neutral (though slightly different then ABW) B+W prints.
Brian at ColorHQ suggested that the profiles might be corrupted and promptly resent them to me. They made no difference.
He suggested recalibrating the printer. I did so; no change.
I recalibrated my monitor; no change
Then the mystery deepened. I tried printing trough PS3 directly, soft proofing the image. The soft proof showed a distinctly cyan/blue shift (the opposite of above) and printed that way.
I then printed through the 16-bit plugin in Digital Photo Pro and without any changes to the color settings, (everything at 0), the photo's were totally neutral, just as they had been last June.
I updated the driver and plugin to the latest, with no change, the PS plugin remained too red/magenta, PS itself too blue/cyan and DPP right on.
With little hope I updated to 10.5.8. No change.
The only remaining thing to do that I can think of is reinstalling PS, a chore I 'm not looking forward to.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!
Carl