[fmalloy]

I'm using Panther with Photoshop Elements. My photo looks terrific on the 17" iMac LCD, but printing on an Epson 740 (using the Apple Panther included driver) shows a much darker, unusable image. Other than the dark image, the quality looks great on glossy paper.

- I tried setting Epson 740 in Color Management in Print Preview of PSE. The color looks different, but still too dark
- Print Preview shows a fine looking image
- I set up the options in the printer driver to 720DPI highest quality, color, four-color, Epson glossy photo paper
- I cleaned the print heads. Printer seems OK.

Photos looked terrific with the 10.2 Epson driver in GraphicConverter, so now I've got to debug what is going wrong:

- Apple Epson driver
- Driver settings
- Photoshop Elements

Before I get into color management, I want to get the image brightness correct. I'll start messing with the ColorSync options in the driver, the brightness/contrast levels, gamma, try printing from GraphicConverter again, etc. But before I waste too much expensive photo paper in testing I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas off the bat.

Frank

[msuper69]

Originally posted by fmalloy:
...
Before I get into color management, I want to get the image brightness correct. I'll start messing with the ColorSync options in the driver, the brightness/contrast levels, gamma, try printing from GraphicConverter again, etc. But before I waste too much expensive photo paper in testing I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas off the bat.

Frank

Why don't you just test with regular paper until you get the color settings working? ColorSync is the solution to getting the images to look the same on your screen and on paper. That's what I used after seeing similar results as you have.

[fmalloy]

Originally posted by msuper69:
Why don't you just test with regular paper until you get the color settings working?

Problem is, photos look so bad on regular paper (the ink smearing and saturation) you can't tell what's going on.

[zigzag]

I had the same problem printing photos from Elements on my HP - too dark. Rather than figure out ColorSync, HP's Auto Image Enhancement, etc, I simply made it a practice to raise the brightness level a step in the print menu (in the HP driver it's buried under Paper Quality > Color Options), which gives me good results.

Bear in mind that Mac monitors are usually set to brighter levels than PC monitors. I could be mistaken but I suspect that the printers are geared towards PC settings and that this might be why things come out darker when you print from Macs. In other words, because the Mac monitor is brighter, you don't brighten the image as much as you would on a PC, so it comes out correspondingly darker in the printer. Just a theory - I don't pretend to understand all the technology.

I have a number of books on PS Elements and they all seem to give different advice about settings. I've concluded that it pretty much comes down to trial and error. Find a setting that works and stick with it. It'll cost you a few sheets of photo paper but I'm not sure there's a better method.

[zigzag]

Addendum: one method I read about suggested taking a single sheet and a single image (preferably with a range of tones) and printing sections of the image one section at a time on the same sheet, adjacent to each other. Divide the image into, say, 4 sections with different settings on each. Write the settings down as you print each test section. Compare the results and go with the settings that work best. Nothing magic about it but it saves ink and paper.

[fmalloy]

Problem solved. Trashed the default printer driver from Panther (GIMP drivers) and installed Epson's driver from Disk 3 of 10.3. Now prints look great.

Frank