On 3/21/06 9:49 AM, "Brian Smith" <zen1@...> wrote:
> This may be of help to some people.
> Last night I made a new profile for epson archival matte (enhanced
> matte?) on the epson 2100. This time I printed the 225 patch target
> with the colour density (in epson's driver dialogue) reduced by 20%.
> Otherwise it was the same as the first profile I did with 'no colour
> adjustment', 1440dpi, hi-speed unchecked. There was a startling
> difference in the target print.
> Before, it was not possible to differentiate by eye, in good light,
> between A1 and B1 and between any of the patches K6 to O6 and K7 to
> O7. With the reduction in print density there was a clear visible
> difference in the patches and the resulting profile gave much better
> detail in the shadows and dark foliage areas.
>
> It certainly pays to study your target print and optimise that before
> making a profile.
Nice work Brian! This is the benefit of having the ability to build your own profiles as the
possibilities are infinite!
I can finally understand why Bill Atkinson offers "Bouquet of Profiles" for each paper. Some
"Bouquet" can have 48 profiles for one paper...Sheesh!
http://homepage.mac.com/billatkinson/FileSharing2.html
We have total control over how a profile is built, with many different media types and a
other settings such as Epson's Color Density adjustment, Saturation and Dry Time.
My most recent test was finding the media setting that produced the smoothest black to
shadow transition with William Turner - in the end the UltraSmooth media setting was the
best. It has taken some time but it was well worth the effort and just learning and
understanding how it all works together can only make me a better printer.
I posted the below a few days ago but I post again just in case anyone has missed it:
I too have found media settings are fairly close to each other but I wanted to explore a
little more. Epson's black usually comes in hard and fast, less so with the newest printers
but I wanted to find the media setting that has smoothest black from 100% to 90%.
So I recently tested the "best" media setting for William Turner paper on my Epson 4800.
I printed a ten patch gray ramp from 100% to 90% with five media settings.
My Excel results are below for William Turner on an Epson 4800:
http://homepage.mac.com/johnvito/WilliamTurnerMediaSettings.png
From 100% to 90% only two media settings show linear density loss albeit stepped at
times. While the other three actually have spiked increases in density called reversals
on some patches. For
example Epson's Enhanced has the same density at the following patches: 100%, 99% and
97%. As
you can see the 98% patch has a lower density. Another reversal at 94%.
My choice is the UltraSmooth media setting, as it has the most linear path.