Epson L1800: cannot print with correct colors!

[nonhocapito]

I am not a professional photographer or anything. I bought this rather expensive printer (Epson L1800) mainly to print A3 pictures to hang around the house or gift to friends and relatives.

I had an Epson 1290s in the past, and it printed PERFECTLY, using its profiles and color management in Photoshop.

With this printer, all prints turn out too dark (like a veil of grey is all over it) or too bright and contrasted.

I am using the printing/paper profiles that came with the printer driver.

Original photos are mostly family pictures in jpg, or art reproductions.

I tried:

1) Converting to the printer color profile with the paper I am using + No color management in the printer, only in Photoshop
This gave the worst result. Consistently darker pictures with low contrast. (Assigning the profile doesn't work either, as the photo usually turns too dark on the screen already)

2) Converting to printer color profile with the paper I am using+ Color management in printer (Advanced > ICM)
Somewhat better results, but still dark

3) Saving the profiled picture to TIFF and printing with Adobe Color Printer utility + No color management in the printer
Result on the contrary strangely too bright and contrasted!

Several other variants using other color modes in the printer settings didn't provide good results either.

I have been using method 2 so far, which requires me to first alter the levels of the photo to make it brighter with higher contrast - but the result is always a bit disappointing, and I know this cannot be the right process to follow.

What can I do? What can I try?

(I suspect the culprit may even be photoshop itself - when I print PDFs for my wife, without checking any color settings, they seemingly come out more faithful to the original than any photograph.)

 

[koraks]

Welcome to Photrio! I understand your frustration with this; it's one of the hurdles in color printing. It sounds like you've tried some sensible options, so it's disappointing the issue persists.

I guess I can only reflect from my own experiences using an Epson 3880 - a totally different printer, but the principles are in the end the same. Here's what I do when I need to inkjet print with decent color accuracy:
* I've calibrated my monitor. This is essential, since monitors are often set far too bright or too dim, and the color balance is often off as well.
* When printing color, I use Epson's Print Layout tool. It's a kind of crude app, but it works quite well. I use the following settings for color management:

* Files I save as JPG, PNG or TIFF in a normal color profile; typically sRGB. I don't do conversions in software unless I'm printing from GIMP. In that case, I will convert to the target profile (see below) in the photo editor and then save as TIFF.
* The profile I use is a profile that came with the paper I use; in this case Hahnemuhle Baryta. It turns out that this profile works quite well for other paper types, too, so I often don't bother selecting a different one.

For me, this yields quite accurate prints that look very close to what I see on my monitor.

I suspect the culprit may even be photoshop itself

Well, not as such, but it does seem likely you're overlooking a part of Photoshop's color management chain, or an interaction between that and the color management of your printer. You may end up doing several profile conversions with one or two being unintended and happening 'under the hood', so to speak.

A final issue is that there may be a gamma mismatch, given the fact that the problem seems to be brightness/contrast related. Again, I'd start by calibrating your monitor!

 

[nonhocapito]

Welcome to Photrio! I understand your frustration with this; it's one of the hurdles in color printing. It sounds like you've tried some sensible options, so it's disappointing the issue persists.

I guess I can only reflect from my own experiences using an Epson 3880 - a totally different printer, but the principles are in the end the same. Here's what I do when I need to inkjet print with decent color accuracy:
* I've calibrated my monitor. This is essential, since monitors are often set far too bright or too dim, and the color balance is often off as well.
* When printing color, I use Epson's Print Layout tool. It's a kind of crude app, but it works quite well. I use the following settings for color management:
View attachment 363059
* Files I save as JPG, PNG or TIFF in a normal color profile; typically sRGB. I don't do conversions in software unless I'm printing from GIMP. In that case, I will convert to the target profile (see below) in the photo editor and then save as TIFF.
* The profile I use is a profile that came with the paper I use; in this case Hahnemuhle Baryta. It turns out that this profile works quite well for other paper types, too, so I often don't bother selecting a different one.

For me, this yields quite accurate prints that look very close to what I see on my monitor.



Well, not as such, but it does seem likely you're overlooking a part of Photoshop's color management chain, or an interaction between that and the color management of your printer. You may end up doing several profile conversions with one or two being unintended and happening 'under the hood', so to speak.

A final issue is that there may be a gamma mismatch, given the fact that the problem seems to be brightness/contrast related. Again, I'd start by calibrating your monitor!

Thank you so much for your answer!

About the monitor calibration... I don't think it can be the issue... but I may be wrong...

The monitor has its own ICC profile (it's a fairly new LG);
When I look at the same pictures on another device (a phone for instance), they certainly look similar to what I see on the monitor, not to what comes out in print;
The differences between the prints and what I see on the monitor, especially in terms of brightness, may be too noticeable to be amended with gamma correction...
I am not 100% positive about the above though. I'll look at gamma correction.

In regards to using Epson Print Layout, I've installed it but, funnily enough, it doesn't see the Epson printer!

At any rate, if I get it to work, should I indicate as ICC profile the (for example) "Epson L1800 Glossy Photo Paper" profile, and otherwise do not convert the picture to any profile at all?

I wonder if a similar choice would apply to printing from Photoshop too? Usually I convert the picture to the Epson L1800 paper profile, then I ask the printer to manage the colors. I wonder if I should skip the first step instead? I don't think I've ever tried that variant.

 

[koraks]

Yes, there's no need to convert to a different profile if you apply the correct printer/paper profile in the print dialog. You do either one, or the other, but not both. You will indeed get problems like you describe if the same print profile is applied multiple times to the same image.

I also agree that monitor calibration will only make a small difference most likely. Although I do note that the color balance of both of my monitors as well as their brightness changed significantly when I first calibrated them. The factory settings were quite far off; it looked very pleasant, but not necessarily correct.

 

[nonhocapito]

Yes, there's no need to convert to a different profile if you apply the correct printer/paper profile in the print dialog. You do either one, or the other, but not both. You will indeed get problems like you describe if the same print profile is applied multiple times to the same image.

I also agree that monitor calibration will only make a small difference most likely. Although I do note that the color balance of both of my monitors as well as their brightness changed significantly when I first calibrated them. The factory settings were quite far off; it looked very pleasant, but not necessarily correct.

Well what makes this confusing is that, when selecting "printer manages colors" in Photoshop, the printer ICC profiles in the printing settings are grayed out - and then, in the driver settings itself, those profiles are not available either. There is instead a shorter list of generic "Epson Glossy paper", "Epson Photo paper" profiles. No matte, for example... so letting the printer manage the colors results in less choice in terms of paper.
This is why I thought you have to convert the image profile to the paper you want, first.

This seems to suggest that letting photoshop (or another photo software) manage colors should be the way to go, instead?

When doing so, the list of paper-specific profiles for your printer becomes available.

But then my question is: in doing so, should I also *not* convert the image to any specific profile? Only select the printing profile in the print settings?

So many printing guides suggest you must convert to the specific printing profile you want...
I remember doing this with my previous Epson printer 1290s.

 

[nonhocapito]

I stand corrected, the matte profile is present. Still, there are 8 paper specific profiles to select from in Photoshop, and only 6 in the printer driver.

 

[koraks]

letting the printer manage the colors results in less choice in terms of paper.

OK, a few remarks.

Firstly, don't confuse paper settings with color management. Epson print dialogs tend to have settings for paper options that affect factors like the amount of ink deposited, printing speed, paper thickness etc., but also (depending on printer model) whether the matte-black or photo black ink channel is used. For instance, this is what that part (some of it) looks like in my Epson printer driver dialog:

Note that the media type setting does not have anything to do with color management, here. There's an additional part in the dialog that's responsible for color management:

If I choose ICM and then hit Advanced, I can select any of the ICC profiles that the Epson driver recognizes. That dialog has some other relevant options as well:

Note that here, the printer asks for both the input profile as well as the output profile. Keep in mind that when outputting to a device, there's always a source profile and a target profile. WE often focus specifically on the target profile, but an app (Photoshop, your printer driver etc.) needs to know what the source profile of the image is, too. Usually, this information is embedded in the image file. That is, the image contains a field that tells the app which profile to use to display/interpret the image - it generally does not contain the actual profile. This is important, because printing with a certain profile (or displaying to any device, for that matter) is always a matter of translating data from an original to an output state. The app needs to know how to interpret the original. It's very much like Google Translate: you need to tell it which language you're feeding it and which language you want it to translate your text into. The main challenge with image data is that other than this embedded label that should tell an app which source profile is used/intended, the data are just binary data, and they could be any profile ('language'). That's why the Epson dialog at the top explicitly demands you to specify which profile it's supposed to use to interpret the source image data.

This may be part of your problem with wonky colors; maybe the printer driver is converting to the correct output profile just fine, but it's interpreting the source image data wrong. If you feed it an Adobe RGB encoded image and the printer driver thinks it's being fed sRGB, there won't be any error or warning and the colors on your print will look totally off (and contrast and luminosity, too!)

I'm showing the drop-down of output profiles available to me, some of which I installed separately from the Epson driver (e.g. the HFA, which is the Hahnemuhle profile I mentioned earlier). Note that I had to check the "Show all profiles" box; otherwise I only get the "Epson standard", which is likely the Epson-provided profile for the media type I selected. In this case, media setting probably (....) influences color management indirectly. Yes, it can get confusing, and to make matters worse, the driver dialogs for your printer will look different from mine. For this reason, it's logical that people recommend using Photoshop to do the conversion, because Photoshop looks the same regardless of what printer is used, so a guide to do printer color management won't have to deal with the endless variations in printer driver dialogs. However, if you're familiar with your printer driver dialog, you can usually (on a quality printer like your Epson) get from it what you need. It's just specific.

There may be several reasons why you see fewer ICC profiles to choose from in your printer dialog as opposed to Photoshop. Photoshop may show profiles that aren't really for printers anyway (e.g. monitor or capture device profiles). Photoshop may be showing additional profiles in a proprietary profile directory that aren't available in other apps on your operating system since they're Adobe/Photoshop-exclusive (at least in the way they're installed). And finally, there can be a setting in your printer driver (as in mine; see above) that hides certain profiles for whoever knows what reasons (probably to try and keep things simple). If you have difficulty using the profile you need in the printer dialog, obviously use Photoshop instead.

The main thing is, and remains, that the conversion to the output profile should happen once, and only once. If you convert your image into the target/printer+paper profile in Photoshop (the colors should look a little funny when you do that, unless you enable soft-proofing), be sure to disable color management in your Epson driver. The printer driver should just pass the data unaltered (sort of...let's not get too technical) to the printer and not apply any other color management on top of it. For instance, I would set my printer driver to the following option if I were to let Photoshop (or in my case, GIMP) do the conversion:

Alternatively, just leave the original image in a default color space, so either sRGB or Adobe RGB, and let the printer driver do the conversion. In this case, I would select the options as I did in the illustrations above. In Photoshop (GIMP), I would leave the image alone and not apply any color profile, and only verify that the image is in sRGB or Adobe RGB. I mostly choose to work in sRGB because it's the de-facto standard for digital display and apps or devices that aren't color-managed tend to assume sRGB, so it's a safe bet. Don't worry about a smaller gamut; your inkjet printer has a waaaaay smaller gamut than either sRGB or Adobe RGB anyway, at least in the real world.

So, to summarize:

• Convert your image to the target ICC profile only once.
• Do it either in Photoshop, or in your printer driver dialog.
  • When doing the conversion in Photoshop, be sure to disable color management in the printer driver.
  • When doing the conversion in the printer driver, be sure to keep your image in Photoshop in sRGB (preferably) and don't apply other profiles to it.
• Understand that there's always a source and a target profile, and that a color problem in your print may be related with either (or both).

Hope this helps in any way. If it's any consolation - I do feel your pain, as do most people who have seriously tried to get accurate colors from a printer. But as you've found with your previous printer, once you know how to get it right, you do it that way and tend to forget the complications under the bonnet.

 

[nonhocapito]

Thank you so much for all the knowledge. This was incredibly useful.

My printer driver settings doesn't have all of those options. I can choose Color Control>Adobe RGB, or else ICM, but the choice of profiles never changes.

Nevertheless, things have progressed significantly.

With all the variants I had tried, I never actually considered NOT converting to an Epson L1800 profile!
That's a case for you of applying too much information to a problem...

I realize now I was basically applying that conversion twice...

I am now skipping that part, color managing in Photoshop, and had much finer results.

Even better, I took a resulting good print and compared it to the monitor. By lowering the saturation slightly in the monitor settings, I have now achieved a real similarity between the two.

This is great! Finally a workflow!

 

[koraks]

I am now skipping that part, color managing in Photoshop, and had much finer results.

Perfect! That's a fine way of doing it.

And good job matching your monitor to your printer. Makes perfect sense to me, and your eye adjust to the new monitor settings virtually instantly.

Great to hear the situation has improved; have fun printing!