Color management problems printing to Epson R2880 from CS3

Question

I recently purchased an Epson R2880 printer. I am having a lot of trouble getting good color when printing from Photoshop CS3. I am running OS 10.4 on a G4 Mac. I have a high-quality monitor and an EyeOne calibrator. I have spent a total of a few hours on the phone with tech support from the store where I bought the monitor and calibrator, and with Epson. To try and keep it simple, I am using all Epson products (ink, paper, their ICC profiles downloaded from their site). I have calibrated my monitor to brightness: 80, white point: 5000 K, Gamma 2.2.
All that tech support has brought me to the point where prints I get on Epson Velvet Fine Art paper and almost where they match what I see on the monitor, though they still could use a touch more red. I've tried making a slight curves adjustment to the red channel but I still don't quite have it. But it's basically acceptable.
So then I tried Epson Premium Presentation Matte paper. After a lengthy session with the Epson tech, we determined that I can get a print that's almost right by printing out of Preview and letting the printer manage colors. If I make a levels adjustment and brighten it a good bit, I get a very good print. But if I try printing on that paper from CS3 I get something that looks like a washed out black-and-white print with a hint of color in it. The Epson tech (a level 2 tech) told me to use the SPR 2880 Matte Paper-HW profile. Didn't help. At that point he said that he'd done all he could do and that for further assistance I needed to contact Adobe about "advanced settings in Photoshop." Of course, I'd prefer to print out of Photoshop because it gives more options in terms of placement and size of the print on the paper.
So here are my questions:
- Is this kind of thing par for the course, and will I eventually figure out a system that gives me good results all the time with any Epson paper I choose with a minimum of tinkering with levels and curves?
- Or should I expect more from a printer that costs almost $1,000 and should I return it for, say, a Canon?
- Is there information online about those "advanced settings" the Epson tech was referring to?
- Or would I be advised to purchase a one-on-one phone consultation from Adobe Photoshop tech support to resolve these problems?
Thanks,
Helen

Answer 1

Mike,
Gee Ramón, I am guessing Mike did a search for Epson R2880/CS3 and noticed that a Mac user was having the same problem he was. If together, maybe Windows users and Mac users can come together and solve the problems of the Epson R2880, maybe we can set a good example for the Republicans and Democrats in Congress :-).
Anyway, since I posted this problem, I have been working on it getting input from a variety of people. The person who finally helped me was Jim, a tech at ColorHQ.com. If you are in the US or Canada and have to buy a monitor and/or calibrator, definitely consider buying it from them, because they offer free tech support to their customers!
So regarding yellowness, one thing that you definitely should look at is how you're calibrating your monitor. Despite some of the replies above that recommend calibrating to 6500K, ColorHQ, which specializes in solutions for the printing industry, told me that calibrating to 5000K is the print industry standard. (While 6500K is the standard for working on images for the web or for editing video.) 5000K will make the monitor look yellower, so see whether that's a better match to what you're printing. I have an Eizo monitor and am running their Color Navigator software. The nice thing about that is something called Color Navigator Agent that allows me to switch between calibration profiles on the fly if I'm doing some web work and then want to work on images for printing.
Calibrating to 5000K was helpful, but not the solution in my case. The ultimate solution to my problem was more of a Mac issue, so I don't know if this will help you, but I'll post it in case anyone refers to this discussion in the future: there evidently IS an issue with ColorSync Utility in the Mac interfering with Photoshop managing colors in OS 10.4. In my case, ColorSync was causing the printer to preserve RGB values rather than use the ICC profile. The afore-mentioned Jim suggested that I go to Edit: Convert to Paper Profile, then pick the profile from the list. When printing, in the first Photoshop dialog box choose Color Handling: No color management. All the other settings in the next dialog box are the same as when you don't want the Epson to manage colors. So what you're doing is making it so the profile is built into the file, and neither Photoshop nor Epson are managing colors.
The result to this was MUCH better. The soft proof is a little redder than the print, but I can adjust that by creating a curves adjustment layer and pulling down the red curve in the middle a little bit if I want to see what the print will look like. I can live with that.
Also Jim pointed out that those papers that you mentioned are in fact a little warm in tone -- put Velvet Fine Art next to a piece of ordinary copy paper from say, Staples, and you'll see the difference. He suggested that if it's the matte look I want (it is) that Hahnemuhle makes a couple of papers that are brighter: Photo Rag Baryta and Bright White He also likes Ilford Gold Fiber silk, but that's a luster satin finish. You can download the Hahnemuhle profiles from Hahnemuhle's web site and compare them in "Soft Proof" mode in Photoshop with the Epson papers you mentioned and get an idea of the difference with your images. I haven't actually printed on them yet, but I see what he means.
Good luck, and I'd be interested to know how it goes for you.
--Helen