Lightroom printing problem

[Stephen Girimont]

Wow. I just encountered the weirdest printing problem out of Lightroom and I'm wondering if anyone here has any suggestions before I delete and re-install.

I'm trying to print out this image:



I'm using LR 4.3, printing to an Epson 7890 and I'm running OSX 10.6.8.

Print setup is exactly what I've been using for hundreds and hundreds of prints, but what I'm getting is this odd multi-layered, smeared sort of image (a detail of which you can see here:)



Fortunately, I was paying attention as the print was coming out and was able to stop it before wasting too much paper. The lines at the left of the image are supposed to be the border of the image (I'm trying to print out a stroked border so I can cut the image to size from the 24" paper).

It's not just this image, either. I've tried printing a print target that I use to check the nozzles and it, too, is smeared in this weird way. I've printed the print target out of Photoshop CS6 and it prints just fine. I've shut everything down, including my network hubs, and restarted and I keep getting this from LR. It's definitely a LR error.

Thoughts?

[RikkFlohr]

I would try a preference file reset before a reinstall.

[Stephen Girimont]

Tried that. Had to look up where the preferences were stored these days because I haven't had to do anything like this since way back in OS9! Guess I've had a good run of luck.

Anyway, it didn't work.

Did an uninstall and a re-install and that didn't work either!

I finally figured that something was corrupted in my catalog, so I went to the backups and got one from a few weeks back that let me print again.

Except for that image. Something is corrupted in it and it apparently corrupted my catalog, though I don't know how.

Anyway, I'm starting from scratch with that pano image, taking the raw files and stitching them and we'll see if that works.

Very, very weird.

[Stephen Girimont]

Wow. I would never in a million years have guessed the cause of this.

The cause was a custom paper size setting of 24x37 inches. If I use any other paper size, it works.

I was trying to use 24x37 so I could cut out the 20x36 page from it.

I figured this out when I recreated the design in InDesign and exported it to a PDF. When the PDF was visually OK but printed the same way, that started me thinking that whatever was causing this might not be in the image data. I started eliminating variables like the printer profile and whatnot and eventually hit on the paper size.

Go figure. No idea what it is about the custom size, but I'm glad I worked it out.

I went with the canned 24x36 paper size and I'll just trim in from the top and bottom to get the height I want.

[wolfnowl]

Wow!  Good for you!  I remember, writing Fortran code for GIS back in the 80s, I had written this database program that crunched data to create a map.  The thing was, if I removed the explanatory text from the code, it worked fine.  If I left the explanatory comments in the code, it would work fine until the point it was drawing a border around the outside of the map (pen plotter days).  It would draw three sides and stop 1/2 way down the fourth side.  The only difference was the non-code text comments in the file.  Ghosts in the machine methinks.

Mike.

[framah]

Strangely enough, I have seen that same thing from MY printer last week.
I called Epson and we figured out that the only thing  that had changed was an update I did the night before. When the computer tells me that there are software  updates I check the list and pick ones I might need. This one was an update for the printer.

After deleting the driver for the printer and reloading from the DVD it came with, it printed fine again.

so... did you upload any updates?
Can't imagine the paper size causing that but, who knows the mind of these machines??

Here's what my machine gave me:

]]

Thing is... it's really cool looking, but not quite what the customer wanted.