Hi Francois,
I do not think that is not correct. Targets must be printed with Colour management off completely but your driver settings are ok. I'm not familiar with printing with PS so cannot tell you how to set it so CM is "OFF".
Are you sure PS is set correctly for printing a normal print; "Printer manages color" will not be correct, you need PS to do that once the profile is set up.

One way to check your normal print set-up is to use Epson's own profile for your paper. Their standard profiles are always reliable, if you get over saturation with an Epson profile, then your set-up in PS is wrong.

Off your topic just a little but It's a pity you are not using Qimage to print, there is a specific set-up to recall within that for printing targets; all you then have to do is set the driver from within Qimage to what you show. Worth considering to get superior prints compared with PS, as well as being easy to control the colour management set-up 

Terry

Thanks for your reply guys.

Terry/Fred, you are correct: there is a "No color management" option in PS that I had not noticed. I just re-printed a target with it. We'll see after it dries. However, at first sight, it does not appear significantly different from the others I've printed. But we'll see.

Also, I've tried the demo version of Qimage, same problems.

Would you guys know why the full black and full white patches of the IT8 target always come up with an X??? Is this normal?

The images I print with the profile generated from Profile Prism have the same issues in PS or in Qimage

Hy Ray,

Thanks for your input. And I just want to say thay maybe my answer will look defensive, it is not.... I just want to say what I've been doing in the hope I will be found wrong somewhere...... 

First off, I should say I'm getting good results with Epson paper with Epson ink using Epson's preset. I have purchased PP to depart from manufacturer's paper, which I though (from everything I've read around) was possible. And I calibrate my monitor before every attempt at defining a new profile... I've ben caught before.....  So since I'm getting a "match" print with this, I assume my workflow is ok, or should I??? 

I'm sticking to glossy and semi-gloss paper. I've heard that the R1900 is not all that great with matte paper and, in any case, my photo clients all want glossy or semi-gloss. And I have to say that I really like the quality (and the price...) of the Redriver paper. They have great profiles too, so what I'm doing with you guys is to try to at least come close to those, as an exercise to learn what I'm doing wrong while using Profile Prism. Once I master Profile Prism, I'll be more adventurous with other papers.

Thanks for the "High Speed" vs other. Will remember this and make sure it consistent.

I'm using the PP supplied test image, as well as Bill Atkinson's Lab Test image to check colors.

Could you explain a bit more about prophoto? I'm using Adobe RGB, but I know that Lightroom works with Prophoto (although I'm testing everything from Photoshop, I'd like to use the profiles with Lightroom as well, eventually... when it works.....)

Hi Francois,

Good, you are almost there, I guess. A year or three ago, on Fred Miranda's forum, there was an excellent article on colour management, and photo editing wrt photoshop. I looked for it a few month's ago, but was unable to find it. The author explained the advantages and snags in editing in pro-photo - a very wide gamut, 16bit colour space. The major advantage was the lack of banding which can occur if editing in an 8 bit space, a disadvantage being you had little idea what was happening outside of your monitor colour space (and at the time, iirc, some ps stuff did not work in prophoto). Of course, it depends on what processing you want to apply to your images, if the gain is worth the pain. If you are not into 'precise' image adjustment, if time does not allow, then I guess the next best thing is to stick with, say, adobe rgb throughout, maybe the 16bit version will eliminate many of the banding problems anyway.

However, wrt out of gamut, I have posted here before, a link to colour charts generated in prophoto colour space. You can load them into ps, set the out of gamut highlighting, then see how much of the pro photo colour space will be visible in any icc profile you care to test it against. It is not just a question of the printer gamut being smaller (or bigger) than your monitor colour space, but where it is sort of offset. You compensate for these issues by setting your rendering intent. You also have to be aware that the average monitor works to an srgb colour space, smaller than adobe, and corrections are made to the darker colours, since monitors do not display a black too well. However, your printer does print black pretty good (but not white - white is the colour of your paper and maybe ambient light reflections, usually).

PP also gives a smaller colour space than a profile prepared with better equipment. Mike has given his reason's for that somewhere, possibly in one of his articles. You could check that with one of the profile viewers, if you did a pp profile on your existing epson paper and compare it with the one provide by epson, the one that works for you. If you then view the pro photo charts with the gamut warnings for your own generated and the epson generated profiles, you may be able to see the difference in size and location between the two.

Having said all this, pp generates profiles good enough in most cases, certainly much better for glossy papers  than textured, and unless you are being very picky, I suspect there is something obvious (after we see what is causing it) that you/we are unaware of.

I guess you've cleaned the scanner glass, let it warm up for half an hour or so? I tend to scan the images three or four times, then use the last image. I use the 'bright' test print. If you have 'double profiled' your monitor e,g, left the adobe default settings and added the new, or have fallen into the mess that is w7, then it will be more difficult for you to sort it out.

Once you have set the profile, it should make little difference to the colour quality you get for the print whatever software you use to print from, unless you add some differences between the print work flows, such as sharpening or resizing.

I think you should not try changing what you are used to wrt editing, adobe, or whatever, until we have sorted out your pp problems. A good start would be for you to prepare a profile for your existing Epson paper, and compare that with the Epson profile. You are starting then from a known position, and I am fairly certain that there are others here with the same paper, who may well profile it on their scanner, so that if your results are not good, they can see what their results are like.

Best wishes,

Ray

added  link to pro photo charts part way down http://ddisoftware.com/tech/printers/prophoto-workspace-with-epson-9900-profiles/msg4673/#msg4673

In reviewing your post with your settings, I came across the above.

This is incorrect!
The target image needs to be printed at its native size; 5.77 x 7.92 @ 390 ppi
Please recheck that.

Fred

Fran,
Any chance you could do a screen snap of the histogram and the color curves from Profile Prism when you make the profile?

Fred