"Epson EPX785- Win98- Photoshop5": How I moved out of the incompatibility
nightmare and into the digital darkroom in a mere 3 hours of research.
***********
I wrote this for Windows 98 users who have made their first dark and muddy
prints from a new inkjet printer and want to get a first start in finding
out why.....
After much reading, I found that there are two parts to making prints. None
of this info came with my printer. No mention of these topics was in the
manual.
1. Calibrate the monitor to a fixed standard that the editing software
already understands.
2. Point the editing software at an "editing space" that is like a
super-duty printer driver.
Details?
Step 1a: Monitor calibration.
=====================
My monitor has some user selectable settings. I was able to keep my
web-browsing settings in my "User" profile and chose 7500 degrees Kelvin (a
different channel sort of) before calibrating. The calibration process
allowed me to zero-in on a neutral color temperature. During the
calibration procedure one actually adds a new layer of software between the
computer and the monitor driver, much like another software driver.
I have Photoshop Elements, v1 and Photoshop 5. I accomplished step 1 by
running Adobe Gamma which ships with Elements. (On my Windows 98 second
edition machine, I clicked on Start, then Settings, then "Adobe Gamma".
(It's also stored in the c:\program files\common files\adobe\calibration
folder and it's called "Adobe Gamma Loader.exe") Leaving my own "User
settings intact,
I chose the 7500 setting, maximized the contrast and started "Adobe Gamma".
I followed the instructions and saved off a thoughtfully named profile in
the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\COLOR folder. I called mine "JL" after my initials,
the month and year, and NEC77F for the monitor's model name.
JL_0103_NEC77F_by_Adobe_Gamma.icc
Anyway, you've created a profile of your standardized settings for the
monitor. A book I read said you have to instruct Windows to use it but I
didn't have to. Gamma had already "installed" it as the
default setting. I gotta admit, I lost a lot of brightness but the point is
that the old setting looked like slide film and it was showing me tones that
would never print correctly. (That's why my prints looked ruddy- the
monitor was SHOWING me tones that were completely inconsistent with the
printer.)
1b. To be sure that Windows is using the profile you just created, go to
Start> Settings> Control Panel> Display> Settings> Advanced> Color
Management. I found my newly created profile
(JL_0103_NEC77F_by_Adobe_Gamma) in the list called "Color Profiles currently
associated with this device. If yours isn't, I suppose you just click on
Add which will let you Browse to your .icc profile.
2. The hard part is over. Elements doesn't have any macro recording
ability at all so I use my trusty and rusty Photoshop5. The rest of these
instructions outline how to set up the printer in Photoshop5. Other listers
have already written about calibrating the printer but I can't afford that
yet. For now, it was enough to "tell" Photoshop what printer I'm using.
They make it hard to do that, believe it or not. This is NOT the same as
selecting a printer when printing. This is selecting a printer before
editing. You are specifyijng a "color gamut" or playing field, within which
you'll make all of your editing choices. Just opening a scanned .tif will
convert it into an editing space for the destination profile.
In Photoshop 5 for Windows, click on File, Profile Setup. In the RGB
dropdown box, I found my printer "EPSON Stylus Photo 785EPX." (Sure I know
that inkjet printers use cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks (CMYK) but
the "Digital Photography Bible" says that the Epson printer driver is
looking for RGB numbers which it converts to CMYK values.) Now when you open
a .tif, it shows you, basically, a print preview all the time. As I
understand it, when you open a .tif or a .jpg, the histogram is showing you
what the distribution will look like ON PAPER.
Cool huh? In reflection, it's no wonder the prints were way off. Not only
was my monitor way too light, but the editing software wasn't editing in a
"space" that emulated the printer.
It took hours of reading in Barnes and Noble. Because I don't have the
budget this year, I'll thank them and urge everyone to consider this fine
book called "Digital Photography Bible".
Lama
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