Printing will be the death of me!

[AllyB]

Hello everyone first post here, it all looks super helpful. I really struggle with getting decent prints. I have a calibrated monitor, an Epson p600. I’ve tried from lightroom, from photoshop, I’ve read everything, I understand the difference between monitor light and print, also paper profiles, softproofing etc. my camera is 5dmkiv and I shoot in adobe rgb, lightroom is prophoto, my printer is prophoto yet my prints are currently dirty and desaturated and missing yellows and no detail in the blacks. I thought it was because I tend to use a lot of textures and composites which come in all colour spaces- I convert to prophoto., but today I was testing out stuff and printed an image straight from lightroom with minimal processing and it’s the same. There must be a step that I’m not doing or I have tweaked a hidden setting by mistake. I tried 3rd party inks but they dried out so it’s been to the menders twice for fixing, now I’m back on Epson inks. The printer is just over a year old and is worse now than it has ever been which makes me think I’ve tweaked a setting somewhere... maybe not even in the printer as my last lab print was horrible as well - literally nothing like it looked on the monitor. I’ve never found a printed workflow checklist from A to Z which could talk me through the whole process from import to print. I have Rocco Ancora from capture to print which I watch but I still can’t see where the missing link is. Sorry this has turned out long. Frustrated!!!

[pnodrog]

It may be a conflict about printer management. It is so long since I have done any serious printing that I am reluctant to comment too much other than for the odd bit of printing I do nowadays I leave the colour management to the printer.

This info from adobe may help.

I am sure Manfred will have some good suggestions. Good luck.

[inkista]

Have you printed out a color test pattern from the P600 to make sure it can actually do yellows? (since you say yellow is missing and you've had clogs before).

Can you maybe post examples of the image and the print so we can see what you're seeing?

[Manfred M]

I've used the P600 and P800 and found them to be excellent printers and do blacks even better than my Epson 3880.

I'd like to understand your workflow a bit better. First of all; Apple or Windows machine?

You say that you are shooting AdobeRGB. I assume this means you are working with JPEG files when you are printing? If you are shooting raw, then the colour space is assigned during the raw conversion process.

Lightroom used a variant of ProPhoto internally, but output can be in a number of different colour spaces so what you write is not completely accurate.

Muddy colours can be a colour space conflict issue. ProPhoto will look quite muddy when it is shown using the sRGB (or Adobe RGB) colour space. Are you converting between colour spaces? If so, how are you doing this?

Muddy colours could potentially come from conflicting instructions to the printer. With Photoshop (my usual printing tool), this is a two stage process; part of the settings are done in Photoshop and the software also gives access to the printer's print management software, where other settings are required. If you are using Photoshop or Lightroom to control colours, then you have to ensure that the printer colour management is turned off. If you are using the printer to manage colours, then neither Photoshop nor Lightroom should be managing colours. The general recommendation is to let Photoshop or Lightroom do the colour management when you print in colour and set the printer to do the management in B&W work.

Muddy colours can also be attributed to clogged nozzles. Missing yellow will result in no yellows being printed, but missing black will result in muddy colours.

Have you selected the correct paper type. Printing with matte black ink on glossy or lustre papers will do strange things, just as using photo black ink on matte papers will give strange results.

I assume you are using a RGB colour space when printing / preparing your prints; not a CMYK colour space. Even though photo inkjet printers uses CMYK inks, they are still RGB output devices.

[Shadowman]

Some good advice given so far. A few tools that helped me get moving were:

Scott Kelby's Lightroom book for digital photographers. You are probably ahead of the learning curve on Lightroom but Kelby does have a printing workflow specific to Epson printers, at least he did up to Lightroom 5.

Fine Art Printing for Photographers, Uwe Steinmueller and Juergen Gulbins, a good book to have around.

https://epson.com/epson-print-layout
The Epson software will get you going quickly and will stop you when you've created or are using incorrect settings, Versace (linked below) advocates editing in ProPhoto if you must, but really pushes that you should convert to RGB before printing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77sx6lvXTac&t=1931s

[Manfred M]

advocates editing in ProPhoto if you must, but really pushes that you should convert to RGB before printing.

ProPhoto is a RGB colour space... There are good arguments made for printing in Adobe RGB if one is using a photo grade inkjet printer, using an 8-bit image.

[AllyB]

Well I thought this would be the best place for super sleuths! Thanks everyone for your input. It is indeed a mismatch of colour space but I’ve still to find out where it is happening. I’m self taught and have missed some very obvious things over time. I only found out a couple of weeks ago that air print only has half the menu so I had to download the Epson driver which at least has now given me the full menu. So, here are my settings. Manfred I’m on a MacBook Pro, and yes I now understand that camera settings are only for jpeg - doh! My bad. I’ve got photoshop set to prophoto on import from lightroom. Now, when I go to edit/assign profile and go into previews for Adobe RGB, srgb, or even paper profiles, terrible things happen to the colours. But when I go to edit/convert to profile and preview the same then nothing much happens and it seems to behave. It is on relative colorimetric. For the colour settings menu, it is set to custom and the working space is set to prophoto and the colour management policies set to convert to working rgb... no idea if that is correct. On the print menu - printer settings - the colour and colour settings are greyed out - has it reverted to air print I wonder? Does any of this make sense? My poor head! I’m sorely tempted to do everything in Adobe RGB or even srgb if it stops all this stuff. What do you think. My work is all commissions and I will not be saving it until everything else catches up with prophoto, it is just giving me a headache! Ha ha. Thanks for listening.

[Manfred M]

Now, when I go to edit/assign profile and go into previews for Adobe RGB, srgb, or even paper profiles, terrible things happen to the colours.

That may be your problem right there. The Assign Profile function does exactly what is says. You have a ProPhoto profile and it resets it as say, AdobeRGB, so the only thing that changes is the embedded profile descriptor. Even though the image data is still ProPhoto, you have told the world to now interpret it as the new colour space; which will give you the muddy colours.

You need to Convert Profile as that takes all the image data and re-calculates the values to the new profile's colour space. It is the next menu item below Assign Profile. In the pop up box, enter the Destination Space that you want to convert to. Make sure that the Engine is Adobe (ACE), rendering intent should generally be set to Relative Colormetric, although on occasion I do use Perceptual (skin tones are sometimes better using it). Leave both Use Black Point Compensation and Use Dither checked.

See if this solves your problem.

[AllyB]

Thanks for the reply. It makes sense if I was converting but I’m just importing, processing and then printing hopefully all in prophoto, at which point does it get converted without my knowledge? Because it sure does as the prints look like the assign profile preview. I do check the box that says photoshop manages colours... this is for home printing which should work fine and has previously, even if spasmodically, but that was probably due to me not getting the hang of icc profiles and just going for ‘glossy’ etc. I’m getting slightly closer to understanding this dark art! I’ve read all your brilliant tutorials. Ally

[Manfred M]

If you run an assign profile step, that could be screwing things up for you. The only time that one would use the Assign Profile edit is in those cases where the image you are working on does not have a profile. It's something I occasionally run into when looking at someone else's work that has been done using an editing tool that does not assign profiles. Based on your workflow, there should be an embedded ICC profile that comes out of your raw conversion in Lightroom. Based on the workflow you have described, that should be ProPhoto RGB.

I generally do all my editing in ProPhoto RGB, but all the printing resources I have consulted suggest that the safest route is to convert to Adobe RGB before printing if for no other reason than it prevents surprises at the print end (no strange things showing up that you did not see on your screen). Some recommend using Adobe RGB throughout the workflow and others recommend using ProPhoto RGB during edits and converting to Adobe RGB for print output. I have not found any disadvantages in using ProPhoto RGB, and there are some advantages to using it.

From a workflow standpoint, let me suggest that you NEVER print from your final edit Photoshop file. Instead save it as a separate print file that you will throw away after you have successfully printed. Some people that I know save their print file as a TIFF format, but frankly I have not seen any advantage of going that route versus a Photoshop PSD format. All of your resizing to the correct paper size and output sharpening should be done to your print file; that leaves you with a "clean" final edit file.

Which papers are you using to print with? I assume you are either using the manufacturer's profiles or have custom profiles for the P600 / Epson inks and paper(s) you are using?