"Dark prints" - no, really ...

[tmphoto]

Would I then expect to see a "reasonable" print, by which I mean one that doesn't look "dark", or with bizarre colour casts?

Yes to get that use a light meter and take an incident reading - your exposure should be correct no matter what you see on the screen.

If you use a gray card to set on camera custom white point your colors should be fine too.

[Trey]

Almost any time someone tells me their prints are consistently too dark, I check their monitor and the brightness is turned up as high as it will go. Apple Cinema displays can get really bright especially, which is great for videos, but not so accurate of what might come out of your printer. I have a wide gamut monitor and I have to set the brightness at around 17% to get it accurate. What I am saying is your printer printed exactly what you told it to, but your monitor is telling you it is going to be much brighter.

Monitor calibration systems are not very expensive and do a really good job on the brightness and the colors. I suggest setting the luminosity to 120 (instead of 100 as some suggest), and white point of 6500 or D65, rather than D50, which is not as bright, but looks like a dingy yellow.

Also, sometimes I find people printing from Photoshop, setting Photoshop to manage the color in the print dialog, and then not disabling color management in the printer driver, thus actually managing it twice. This yields unpredictable results.

Even if your system is totally color managed, still sometimes prints will look dark and dull under certain lighting conditions. Take it out in the mid-day sun and see if it comes alive. We can't all afford viewing booths (I know I can't), but I found a secret. But one of those Ott lights found almost anywhere. It puts out a white light that almost perfectly simulates a D50 standard light source. Under a D50 light, the print should look very much like what you see on your monitor. I still get fooled by this. I will print something and think something went wrong, but look at it under my Ott light and it looks perfect.

Hope this helps some

[Nora_nor]

I am printing the Adobe RGB test images without any editing, so monitors do not matter here.....

now I tried another print, do not remember how, I think I turned off things and used the epson preset in the printer dialogue and left it at sRGB, and it had weak colours and a grey cast. kinda like what happens if one looks at Adobe RGB test images in a web browser that is not colour managed.

Now I went and fetched a new pc laptop from downstairs, downloeaded Epson driver from the uk site, and wanted to try printing from elements2 but got shocked by the new windows Epson print dialogue. I did not know what Elements does with the colour info, so I did not want to waste paper.

Then I downloaded Lightroom4 trial since I know it converts images to some kind of ProPhoto, and spent  some time trying to figure out how to turn off printer colour management, I was shocked it showed me sRGB and ARGB as default.

(with mac everything is greyed out at that stage)

I finally found the no colour management option in some custom mode, there were several different choices...

I then printed the Pixl Test image that is in Adobe RGB, and voila, no more grey cast and the colours are there.
Perfect image.
(Lightroom4, Windows7, the new drivers from the uk site, had to turn off colour management in the print dialogue somewhere)

Now the images and programs are all on macs...
Now the problem lies with apple somewhere, must try to re-install and delete the printer from the printer list etc.

updated: I can get to the black and white mode in the printer dialogue via lightroom , after going to the right in lightroom and choosing printer manages colours, so black and white epson printing is not disabled.

[Nora_nor]

prints perfectly now on mac, after unhiding library!

I guess threatening to go fetch a pc with CS5 helped...

[Tony Jay]

Nothing wrong with experimenting but...

Honestly make it easy for yourself.

Acquire yourself LuLa's CPS tutorial.

Regards

Tony Jay

[Nora_nor]

I printed perfectly in february  on another 4900, but now prints were too dark, and after I did these tricks I could print perfectly again. I think something happened after the large Epson on mac update in march somehow. Anyway, it is fixed somehow now.