Printing AGAIN

Question

Hi all, I know this subject has been covered ad nauseum in this and other forums. SURELY there is someone out there, read Adobe?, who can suggest a bunch of settings for my Windows XP,Samsung monitor, Lightroom 1.3, Epson 2400, setup, that can at least get close to the prints I get from PS CS3. I have spent MANY hours on this and other forums trying to achieve the seemingly impossible. Last year I was fortunate enough to be commissioned to photograph 12 major African cities, in which my client has substantial business interests, to produce a calender which has been distributed worldwide. Through PS CS3 I can produce prints which match the "printed calender" without blinking an eye, yet though LR, I am unable to achieve anything even reasonably close. My client requires many inkjet prints of the images taken for internal and promotional use, and being able to print from within LR would make the task much easier. On reading some of the many posts in this and other forums, I have tried amongsts other things to : reduce print density to -12, changed various colour/contrast brightness settings, tried to rename ICC profiles to ICM (not sure if I got that right), even as a last resort printed with my thumbs crossed!! I know there are issues with prophoto/adobe rgb/sRgb profiles,printing from nefs, not an issue in this case as images are all 16 bit tiffs, but SURELY there is a bunch of generic settings that can get you reasonably close???? I never had issues like this with PS 7, CS 2, IView Media pro and even ACDCEE PRO. Now that I have thown my lot in with Lightroom I dont seem to be able to get even close to prints that are acceptable.HELP please???????
I am not looking for the panacea to all printing within LR, just a workable solution that gets me reasonably close to th images I see on screen.
Kind regards
Kevin Wright.
PS, Samsung 226 bw montor is profiled using Syder one, although I dont believe this is the issue as prints from CS3 are near as dammit to what I see on screen!

Answer 1

I also had problems printing proper prints from LR with my Epson 890 printer when using color management in LR on an XP PC. But it has not always been so.
I have had nice prints with that printer made when I used earlier version of LR (with color management on in LR). I now use the latest LR version 1.3.1 and have struggled a lot with it until I finally got it right. BTW, I use a calibrated Lacie monitor.
My problem is that I do not really know what fixed it, but I wrote a message on this forum about what I did prior to getting it right. You can read it here:
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.3c05b95b
I never got any any feedback though. Don't know if people thought it sound too strange or weird to try out, but my color management now works in LR. So I'm happy now.
And no, it was not just a simple setting in the printer driver or LR that I had to change to fix it. Something is obviously going on behind the scenes. I do suspect that LR does not always (?) setup the print setting as they should, even though they appear to be.
I admit I have not read all threads in this forum about printing problems from LR, so please excuse me if following has been proposed before. But this is what I would try (don't know if it works though):
1) Close all open applications in Win XP.
2) Turn on the printer.
3) In Win XP Start menu select [Printers and Faxes].
4) Right click on the printer you have the problem with.
5) Select [Printing Preferences] to open printer driver window.
6) Make a setup that you absolutely won't use and click [OK] button.
7) Re-select [Printing Preferences] again.
8) Now, make the setup you want to use when you print from within LR. That is, you must select No Color Management and the paper, resolution etc. you want. Then click [OK] button.
9) Open LR, select a photo to print and go to Print module.
DO NOT SELECT ANY TEMPLATE in the Template Browser menu
10) Adjust your photo size by dragging the margins to a size large enough to be able to check the color (no need to make a huge print as long as you don't know the result)
11) In LR Color Management: select the Printer profile that corresponds to the paper you previously selected in the printer driver.
12) Click on [Print] button and select [OK]. If you have print preview on, don't mind if the color seems strange in the preview. Just print.
If this doesn't work, I would try variants of this procedure. As I have already mentioned, I don't know if this will make any difference, but it shouldn't do any harm either. It's worth a try. LR print module is very very nice - when it works...
/Per