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Title: White prints as a very light grey Post by: AndrewPenry on December 03, 2012, 09:18:33 PM I made a profile using Profile Prism and the colors look great. Much better than the stock profile. Everyone is impressed with how nice the prints look.
The only issue I have is when I print using the profile, white gets printed as a very light grey. Most of what I print is papercraft items, and the tend to be PDFs. These pdfs have large white areas. Using the stock profile, white is no ink, but when using the Prism profile white areas are printed as a very light grey. I don't know how much ink is being wasted by printing the white portions, as it's a very, very light shade of grey, but I'd rather have white be white. I can open the files in Photoshop and delete the white to make it transparent. But some of the files I print are 40 pages long, and it can be rather tedious. I have this issue printing from Acrobat Pro and Photoshop. Both Absolute and Relative Colormetric do this. I can verify that the color in photoshop is 255,255,255. Is there something wrong with my profile? Is there some adjustment I can make to force it to print 255,255,255 with no ink? Scanner: Epson Artisan 730 Printer: Epson Artisan 730 Paper: Staples white card stock Purpose: Making paper terrain and other papercraft. Title: Re: White prints as a very light grey Post by: Fred A on December 03, 2012, 09:54:23 PM Quote Is there something wrong with my profile? Is there some adjustment I can make to force it to print 255,255,255 with no ink? Andrew, Is the printer driver set to NO COLOR ADJUSTMENT? Can you please email the profile to me. They are not large files and email easily. My email address is wathree.ssz@verizon.net Thanks, Fred Title: Re: White prints as a very light grey Post by: AndrewPenry on December 04, 2012, 06:12:36 AM The driver is set to Off (No Color Adjustment). I sent an email with the profile. Thanks for looking at this.
Title: Re: White prints as a very light grey Post by: Fred A on December 04, 2012, 10:04:20 AM OK Received!
Will let you know as soon as we can. Fred Title: Re: White prints as a very light grey Post by: admin on December 04, 2012, 03:29:26 PM Andrew,
Fred passed the profile along to me and I took a look at it this morning. I don't see any issues with the profile. 255,255,255 in the image maps to 255,255,255 through the profile. So there's something else going on here. You can print from Qimage (to file), go into CS5 and bring up an image and then use "convert to profile", and these all result in 255,255,255 being mapped to 255,255,255. In fact, with Profile Prism, there's no way that 255,255,255 can map anywhere but 255,255,255 because the tone curves are always scaled so that white maps to white. So I suspect something else is going on. A problem in the driver. The way you are selecting/using the profile? Or perhaps a problem with the profile on the image itself (the one you are printing). I tried several test images from sRGB all the way to ProPhoto and Wide Gamut RGB and all map 255,255,255 to 255,255,255. I'd say check the files you are printing first. It's possible that whatever profile is being used for the source files you are printing has 255,255,255 defined as something other than white! Mike Title: Re: White prints as a very light grey Post by: AndrewPenry on December 18, 2012, 06:44:21 AM I figured out what was causing it, but I'm still fuzzy on the exact reason why. In Photoshop, you can choose between various rendering intents. When I use "Relative Colormetric" it prints white as no ink. If I choose "Absolute Colormetric" it print white as a very light grey.
From the descriptions of these in Photoshop and other places, I don't really understand why Absolute Colormetric would have this problem. Here is Photoshop's description of Absolute Colormetric: Quote Colors that fall inside the destination gamut are unchanged. Out-of-gamut colors are shifted to the closest reproducible color. No scaling of colors to destination white point is performed. This intent maintains color accuracy at the expense of preserving relationships between colors. My best guess is that for whatever reason, Photoshop decides that white is out-of-gamut and shift it to the very lightest gray that the printer can produce. It seems to me that white should always be in-gamut, but I'm new to all this.Title: Re: White prints as a very light grey Post by: Fred A on December 18, 2012, 01:36:53 PM Quote I figured out what was causing it, but I'm still fuzzy on the exact reason why. In Photoshop, you can choose between various rendering intents. When I use "Relative Colormetric" it prints white as no ink. If I choose "Absolute Colorimetric" it print white as a very light grey. You can choose your rendering intents easily in Qimage. Click on the little blue ball to the left of your Printer ICC in Job Properties. Select the intent! Fred |