I have been faithfully using my Epson 2200 for few years now with great results, my favorite is using velvet fine art paper.
I recently got my new toy – Hasselblad 503CWD and the details and colors were so pleasant coming from the 2200 that I decide to order a 7880pro so I can produce larger 24x24 prints.
Well, the printer came yesterday in a refrigerator size carton and the printer is larger than I thought. After a night of setting up and finally able to print, the colors of the first two test prints did not come out the same as the 2200 – the colors and contrast did not have the ‘pop’ and seemed flat.
I am using somerset velvet sheet which is really thick – may I ask a few questions.
1. What paper selection do I set on photoshop? In the manual, it said to set it to posterboard, and there was no somerset setting in the fine art category.
2. Do I select the Pro9880_7880_EMPB_PK profile or let printer manages color?
3. which redering intent do I select? Perceptual, saturation, relative colorimetric, or absolute colorimetric?
4. what is the best type of fine art paper that will produce the most details and colors.. seems like somerset is a bit texture.
I know also one thing I need to get is Matte black, which will make a difference, but is there other settings I am missing?
my DNG files is 5180x5180 which comes out to about 21in x 21in at 240pix/inch.
i print directly on DNG files in 16 bit or should i output to TIFF?
basically, i am looking for the same results of the 2200 to the 7880, or is that not possible due to the large prints?
Epson FA Velvet is an excellent paper, my FA fav with Epson printers. I believe it is Somerset Velvet optimized for Epson printers. Epson has very good profiles too. Epson also has Ultrasmooth Fine Art Matte for a high end matte with no texture.
Use either Perceptual or Relative Colometric, latter works best for me, stay away from Absolute Colormetric only for certain proof printing not RGB inkjets at all.
For textured matte papers 240ppi should work, I'd go to 360ppi for nontextured papers. Not sure if Epson has a 16 bit plugin. I edit in 16bit mode the drop to 8 bit to print, seems to work very well, I save as a TIF to print but I work from Photoshop not Lightroom or Aperture.
If you're printing on matte paper, you need to use matte black, otherwise you're going to take a big hit in contrast. Until you do that, you can't expect your prints to look right regardless of what settings you use.
I've heard that uprezing to to 360 ppi is ideal for epsons, since that's their native print resolution, otherwise the printer does the upsizing.
floris wrote:
If you're printing on matte paper, you need to use matte black, otherwise you're going to take a big hit in contrast. Until you do that, you can't expect your prints to look right regardless of what settings you use.
I've heard that uprezing to to 360 ppi is ideal for epsons, since that's their native print resolution, otherwise the printer does the upsizing.
YEH.. i just ordered matte black inks since it didnt come with the printer.. will definitely try again...
as for upsizing to 360ppi... may i ask, do i do this when i open the DNG file before exporting out to TIFF or bump up in TIFF?
I'm not sure what your workflow is, but I process my raws, then work on them in PS, then flatten, upsize and print. I print in 16bit, but I'm not sure if it actually makes a difference.
Your procedure's mostly fine; "adjust to taste and print" is about the extent of printmaking.
However, at step 4 you take a minor left turn. Sharpening before resizing is like putting the cart in front of the horse—you can do it, is just doesn't work well. Resize first, then sharpen at your final size.
And keep in mind at the sizes you're printing at, you'll probably need to be adding in a decent amount of contrast.
colinm wrote:
Your procedure's mostly fine; "adjust to taste and print" is about the extent of printmaking.
However, at step 4 you take a minor left turn. Sharpening before resizing is like putting the cart in front of the horse—you can do it, is just doesn't work well. Resize first, then sharpen at your final size.
And keep in mind at the sizes you're printing at, you'll probably need to be adding in a decent amount of contrast.
I've always heard that too, and done it, but then I decided I try sharpening before resizing, and found it looked exactly the same for the few files I tried. Basically I'd sharpen my 5D files, and then upsize to a 20x30in print at 360 ppi, and found it looked indistinguishable from the files I upsized and then sharpened. The big difference was that sharpening at the native resolution was much less of a pain then at huge file sizes. This of course entirely depends on how you want your files to look in the end - I want my images to look pleasing close up, so I won't allow for any over sharpening, whereas if you're designing billboards you might want 'oversharpening' - perhaps that's what you mean with adding contrast? In that case it might be better to sharpen after upsizing?
Anyways, I'll check it on a few more files, but for my application, I think I'm going to prefer sharpening at the native resolution from now on.. so others might find it worth checking.
I recently got a 7880 too, but got great results right from the get go. However, I print on luster 260 and not matte paper. I work in 16bit too (Capture NX 1.34 ...adobe 98 colorspace. Then save as a tif...at 600 dpi. The resulting prints are about 800mb to 1.2 gb file size. (Up rezed using Fred's SI plugin in CS4 32 bit - then imaged in CS4 64 bit). I then print - in "Absolute Colormetric "...and the colors were spot on right out of the box. I haven't compared to other people's 7880 output, but I have compared to the 7600 and the 7800 - and my prints were much sharper, and had more saturated rich colors. However, I don't know how the other people set their printers up...and they may be not getting the best results possible. The 7880 prints are wonderful.
The 7880 has 180 nozzles per inch. Make of that what you will. Epson claims a native rez of 360 which is exactly double how many nozzles there are. The driver doesn't resize anything. That's an old myth - one among many. It takes whatever you give it and dithers it to 360 dpi, so there's no real need to scale anything UP to 360. Anything over 180, just send it to the printer and stop worrying about it. I made four 24 x 36 prints this afternoon for a client, all printed at 180 dpi and even on close inspection they look great.
Floris is correct about the ink. You'll get much blacker blacks with the Matte Black, but still nothing like you get from a gloss ink paper. I measure the blackest black on mine to be about 14L in L*a*b with a Spectrolino for Velvet Fine Art, while papers like Premium Semimatte are down around L 6 or 7. Still, the matte ink makes a significant difference, and you probably wouldn't want to print anything critical without it.
To get the most out of your new printer, you really need to make sure all of your ducks are in the same row, and that means great monitor calibration, the right ambient light in your editing room, proper viewing conditions, and finally good custom profiles. I know that Epson's canned profiles are better than they used to be, but good custom profiles are still that much better. I compare them all the time and the differences I see are improved saturation, contrast and color purity along with more neutral gray ramps - pretty much better on all counts. I use ProfileMaker and the previously mentioned Spectrolino.
Finally sharpening. You may find that you need more that one round of sharpening to get the most out of your files. Sharpening for inkjet needs to be fairly aggressive if you want your images to pop. If I'm printing at the file's native res or smaller, I'll usually just sharpen once, but when I'm upscaling for huge prints, I'll almost always sharpen once at a fairly high amount and maybe a radius of .7-.8 and then a second "finer" sharpening round with a lower amount and maybe half the radius. This really helps bring out the finest detail in the file. You may also need or want to mask sharpening layers or use the Blend If sliders to limit sharpening in the extreme highlights and shadows.
Peter Figen wrote:
The 7880 has 180 nozzles per inch. Make of that what you will. Epson claims a native rez of 360 which is exactly double how many nozzles there are. The driver doesn't resize anything. That's an old myth - one among many. It takes whatever you give it and dithers it to 360 dpi, so there's no real need to scale anything UP to 360. Anything over 180, just send it to the printer and stop worrying about it. I made four 24 x 36 prints this afternoon for a client, all printed at 180 dpi and even on close inspection they look great.
I agree with Peter an this, and have tested it quite a bit myself. I send all files to the printer at the native size unless the resulting PPI drops below 180 - and on really big prints I may even go as low as 150.
If it drops below 180, I have found the quality is better by doing an exact 200% uprez (before sharpening), sharpen the new file, and send that file to the printer. This allows an optimum bicubic uprez.
(this is something I started trying after viewing the Camera to Print video mentioned).
The exception are photo printers such as the durst and noritsu used by labs such as mPix and WHCC, and dye-sub printers. With these you should resize to the exact pixel dimensions. With inkjet printers you are better off sending at native file size.
Wayne Fox wrote:
I agree with Peter an this, and have tested it quite a bit myself. I send all files to the printer at the native size unless the resulting PPI drops below 180 - and on really big prints I may even go as low as 150.
If it drops below 180, I have found the quality is better by doing an exact 200% uprez (before sharpening), sharpen the new file, and send that file to the printer. This allows an optimum bicubic uprez.
(this is something I started trying after viewing the Camera to Print video mentioned).
The exception are photo printers such as the durst and noritsu used by labs such as mPix and WHCC, and dye-sub printers. With these you should resize to the exact pixel dimensions. With inkjet printers you are better off sending at native file size. ...Show more →
Thanks for the tips.. that'll sure save some headaches from giant files...
I've never looked at the Camera to Print video, but what Wayne is saying corresponds with what I've been seeing and doing for years. A lot of uses don't require the utmost quality. Make your judgements accordingly.
