when printing from HP Z3100 colors over-saturated and bleeding into each other

[esztermatheson]

I am currently trying to print portfolios on Moab Entrada Natural Rag out of In Design, and the print quality is terrible. the prints are over-saturated and the colors bleed into each other, and the browns and flesh tones are  super orange/ golden. When I exported the ID file and printed from Adobe Acrobat the prints were incredibly crisp, had great depth and detail, but obviously these were without a profile since impossible to print with  a profile from Acrobat. (The print quality was bad on the Entrada paper from PS CS5 also.)

I have printed a lot of very large prints successfully onto moab colorado fibre gloss and calumet's lustre paper, as well as a variety of other papers.

has anyone tried printing from In Design, or on the Entrada paper? what were your results? can anyone shed any light on this for me?

[Ernst Dinkla]

With the Z3100 calibrated for that paper + media preset you should get a nice print if the coated side of the paper is used in all cases.

Make sure all Adobe applications' color management settings are identical. I leave the (CMYK) printing issues of InDesign and Acrobat where they are.  If the total InDesign document was made in RGB color (so no CMYK color descriptions at all) and export done as a Tiff (300 or 600 PPI) or PDF, imported in Photoshop as RGB (300 or 600 PPI) with the same color management settings and the color checked in Photoshop then your last path to the printer will be an RGB image with assigned color space to an "RGB-device" (a plain Z3100 + PCL3 driver) + a suitable RGB-device printer profile + a compatible media preset (see Moab) and should print fine. Like it should be with a plain Z3100.

If there are CMYK elements in the InDesign document then either change them in InDesign to RGB or correct their color in Photoshop if possible.

If the RGB + CMYK elements have to be kept like they are then find a RIP or live with the idea that the output from Acrobat is fine without the CM control you would like to have.

met vriendelijke groeten, Ernst

Try: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wide_Inkjet_Printers/

[esztermatheson]

thank you Ernst for that very comprehensive answer. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that I definitely need to export the file from ID before printing? The  color specialist I employed is trying to have me print out of ID directly, so presumably he has had good results doing this with other clients, however the best result we've recently had has been printing out of PS so I'm thinking that printing importing the PDF into PS might be my best bet. I've also been reading a lot about people having  issues printing since upgrading to CS5 and/or OS X.6.8. Have you heard anything like this? Is ID generally a tricky Application to print from?

[Ernst Dinkla]

Issues with color management due to Mac OS upgrades is another bag of worms and solutions are not really in my field of expertise. Several threads on the subject in this forum's archives to explore for you.

Printing from ID to an RGB-device and CMYK elements in the ID design the workflow is relying on some CMYK to RGB conversions somewhere. That is where the problem starts. If you have the Z3100 PS instead of the plain one version you are halfway to a RIP but as I understand it still is an RGB-device to color management but with Pantone color corrections.

The color expert did check for double profiling etc? The Z3100 driver has a tendency to default to printer controlled CM. I changed the default to application controlled CM in Windows printer settings, Mac will have that feature too somewhere. The files got their color spaces properly assigned? Always good practice but with OS-X upgrades + Adobe software etc even more important.


met vriendelijke groeten, Ernst

Try: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wide_Inkjet_Printers/

[artobest]

I have successfully printed from ID onto Entrada Natural White, but it took a bit of trial and error. In the end IIRC it came down to choosing the correct Transparency Blend Space, and then ensuring the image was tagged, and that at printing ID was handling colour and the correct profile was selected in the Print dialogue. After that I got good results.