Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

cheers,

I print a lot of bright colours, greens, reds, blues and purples etc. Many of these colors are virtually on the edge of the gamut of genuine Epson 10600UC inks and also of my aftermarket pigment ink. When I view the (PP icc profiled) colorwheel printed from the Onyx test print the entire outer edge is rather weak in color, when it should be (in parts) showing the fully saturated colors - blue, green and yellow. Just to check it was weak I also printed my needed file in miniature and sure enough the bright saturated green of the girls dress was looking very yellow and severely weak on blue.

So I edited the file - 8 times - and finally increased the blue (on dress only) to produce a very sharp saturated apple green. So proving the inks are capable of doing this. However I then used the icc file for another print of the Onyx test image and the colorwheel showed an outer wheel patch of dark blue with marked poor blend into the rest of the blue lighter shades, on the RGB wheel and more so naturally on the CMYK wheel.

So at this stage I am impressed by the PP icc profiles print of a very well blended Onyx color wheel - but I wish to increase the saturation of all the colours, so that it looks more like the 'seemingly perfect' Onyx & digital dog test prints from my HP B9180. My PP icc profiles seem good on most neutral colors though the saturated colors are lacking intensity. Is this something I could try to alter in my scanning of the targets?

The cyan colour is the one seeming to be giving me the most trouble with its low saturation - the segmented density bar of the Onyx chart is particularly weak at the bottom - where it should be showing maximum intensity. Yet the multicolour bar shows that a good broad spectrum of all the colours is and can be printed. Why is this?

regards to all   >:(

Update - I think I am doing pretty well here (in NZ!) the PP ICC profile after the 8 (blue) edits (on dress) is proving very versatile on the inkset I am using. For an important subsequent sale I had to decrease the global brightness of the blue edited PP ICC profile by -10 (PP edit of +10brt) and save to different file name for security, the print following check test print came out with colour matching the same image file in Photoshop CS3 on the monitor.

It gives one an eerie feeling of success to see an Epson 10600 printing what is on the monitor!! Albeit with aftermarket ink profiled with PP and its great icc editor.

A lot of time, thought and work is needed - but it works and works well. Nobody should be afraid of buying and using quality aftermarket ink when there is PP for an ICC solution. :-) ;-)