Dark prints with Epson R1800

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Level 1

14 points

Dark prints with Epson R1800

Having upgraded to Snow Leopard, when I print to my Epson R1800 from Lightroom or Photoshop, the prints are extremely dark, and a bit oversaturated. I am printing by choosing a paper profile, and turning off color management in the driver. This worked perfectly before Snow Leopard. If I tell Lightroom to let the printer manage color, then use Epson Vivid with Gamma 1.8, the print is reasonably good. But if I can not choose a profile, I will be limited to only Epson papers.

The latest Apple update for Epson print drivers only contains the Gutenprint driver for the R1800, so I downloaded the latest Snow Leopard drivers directly from Epson. I believe I thoroughly removed the existing drivers before installing.

I am seeing some discussion about this here and other places online, but no solutions that work so far.

Posted on Jan 2, 2010 3:26 PM

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Answer 1

Pmatt Author

Level 1

14 points

Jan 2, 2010 4:45 PM in response to Pmatt

Wait a second, I just realized something very important. If you go to the Epson Drivers page for the R1800...
http://tinyurl.com/2gp4g9

The first link there is a Drivers and Utilities Combo Package for MacOS 10.6 (i.e. Snow Leopard). But the driver that this combo package actually contains is version 6.12, which as listed further down the page, is from 12/18/2007.

So in other words, there really is no Snow Leopard support for the R1800.

Also, the R1800 is not in the product list on the Epson Snow Leopard page...
http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/support/SupportSnowLeopard.jsp

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Answer 2

Feb 18, 2010 7:05 PM in response to Pmatt

HAve you been able to solve this problem?

I am having the same issues!

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Answer 3

Feb 22, 2010 10:57 PM in response to Pmatt

Same issue here. Using the 6.12 drivers from the combo installer on Epson's site.

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Answer 4

Mar 12, 2010 10:22 AM in response to Chris Priebe

The problem is a bug "somewhere". No one seems to know whether it is a colorsync, epson driver or Photoshop color management system issue. What is happening is explained here:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/solving.shtml

The workaround is to create your own custom profile using an X-Rite or other profile system. If you don't have access to one of these and are using canned Epson icc profiles then I'm not sure what to tell you. Apple is in denial, Epson is in denial and Adobe is in denial. Not good.

Going back to 10.5 and PS 2 or 3 might solve the problem. Again not a good solution.

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Answer 5

May 10, 2010 4:43 PM in response to Pmatt

The color scheme changed between 10.5 and 10.6. Our best recommendation is to create new profiles under SnowLeopard.
Hope this helps,
Syd

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Answer 6

elol

Level 1

0 points

May 28, 2010 1:20 PM in response to Epson Mac Tech

on May 13 the the US site of Epson released a combo update for its large scale printers to support snow leopard applied to 10.5.8 and 10.6.3.1

at the same time I tried a download version of CS5 photoshop

results
10.5.8 elements6 prints normal
10.6.3.1 elements prints dark
10.6.3.1 CS5 photoshop prints normal

any other CS5 gives normal prints on snow leopard ... what did adobe do???

cheers elo

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