Hi, I have a Canon i4500 and and am printing from LR2. When I print a sunset where the sky fades from orange on the horizon to dark blue,alternate light and dark banding occurs in the light blue areas. I'm using Canon ChromaLife ink and Photo Paper Pro and set the paper and highest quality setting in the printer dialog. The printer is handing the color management. The gradation is very smooth in LR2 so the banding is occuring during the printing process. I'm running Win7 and have downloaded the current printer driver. I tried printing this image on my old XP machine and the banding was present on that print also.
Any suggestions?
Thanks, Tim
Most articles I have read on printing is to have P/S handle the printing and not the printer. Try and make the change and see if it helps. Sometimes, banding may not show up on your monitor until you zoom in at 100/200%. You may have to create a custom gradient to totally eliminate, but that is just a thought.
I think it's more likely that you have a problem with out-of-gamut colors. The intense colors in a sunset are often prone to going out of gamut. "Banding" in the print will result of colors are out of gamut.
Do you know how to soft proof? Assuming you have a print profile for the specific paper and ink combo you are using, do a soft proof under that profile and view gamut warning. If gray gamut warning areas show up, that's your problem. Easy to find, hard to fix. You can try to adjust the tone (levels, curves) and/or saturation to make it go away.
Another solution is to try a different paper. The gamut range of papers varies a lot. Using the same ink set, some papers have a much wider gamut than others.
I've had this problem with a Canon S9000. However, after using exclusively Canon paper for years, I've switched to Epson and had the problem disappear. Bonus is that Epson paper is cheaper.
I ran the cleaning routine and the nozzles appear to be clean. I'll pick up a pack of Epson paper tomorrow. I have a Staples nearby. Which Epson paper should I try?
Thanks, Tim
Before you buy paper, find and test (soft proof) the profile for that paper that matches your printer. Unfortunately, you will have a hard time finding free "canned" profiles for Epson paper on a Canon printer. Epson won't have them, for obvious reasons.
There are some good third party paper makers that provide profiles for their papers to fit a wide variety of printers. One example is Red River. Here is a page for all the profiles they have for your printer (using their paper).
Does lots of things, but the thing I use it for is to "evaluate" various paper/printer profiles. WinColor will display those strange looking "3D" graphs for any and all profiles on your system. You don't have to be a color managment expert to read the graphs and see that some are "bigger" than others.
To evaluate if a particular paper will solve a gamut problem, download and install the profile and then look at its graph in WinColor. Compare its graph to the graphs of other known printer profiles.
For example, I first encountered gamut problems using Epson Enhanced Matte paper. Same image printed on Epson Premium Luster had no problems. Looked at the gamut graphs for each using Wincolor and WOW, there was a huge difference.
If you live near a Sam's club...they have Ilford galerie for about $23 for 100 sheets 8 1/2x11 in glossy.....and Ilford offers free profiles for many printers.......
Thanks for the suggestions. I looked a WinColor and it appears that it runs on XP only, I'm running Win7. I do have a friend who's a member of Sam's club, he'd be able to pick up some Illford paper.
Thanks, Tim
