Esteemed colleagues,

I have encountered a mysterious problem appearing to coincide with the latest Qimage update to v2022.114. (I appreciate this could be a coincidence).

My system is Windows 10 pro/64 bit and is up to date. The printer is Epson SC-P900 connected by USB and the drivers etc. are up to date. The monitor is a wide-gamut unit (it is a stunner) recently calibrated with "Spider Elite". By way of personal background, I have been printing with Qimage for years and am highly experienced with color management. Since Qimage has never disappointed I'm inclined to think I'm doing something wrong but can't discover what it is. Herewith, the problem:

Color management simply isn't doing what it's supposed to. I have tried letting Qimage manage CM and also the Epson driver (from within Qimage). Both yield a poor result with undersaturated prints. Some colors just wrong even though the print preview is perfect. For example, red is apt to come out as mauve. After methodically reviewing settings and blowing through quite a few consumables on tests - including printer diagnostics - I thought trying another printing product might prove instructive. Accordingly, I installed "Epson Print Layout" mainly because it's free. I went with Print Layout doing the CM. The test image is the one I was printing with Qimage. It's profile is "Prophoto" and printer/paper profile is Epson "Premium Semi-gloss", just like was trying to use with Qimage.

Imagine my surprise at having a gorgeous print produced. Perfect colors and indistinguishable from the monitor presentation. Now, I'd rather be using Qimage for all it's functionality but have to get past this odd problem.

I'm not looking for a detailed response so much as a pointer in the right direction for investigation. Any advice appreciated.

Best wishes
 JHzlwd

When both an ICC profile and "Let printer/driver manage color" both produce the same (bad) results, that's the telltale sign that something is wrong outside of Qimage: both Qimage color management and driver color management are not going to be broken the same way, at the same time.  Hold the Shift key while you click the "Properties" button to open the printer driver dialog.  That will reset all driver settings and start from scratch.  From there, manually configure all settings in the driver like paper type, color management settings, quality, etc.  Then try a new print.  If there's a bad (remembered) setting "stuck" in the driver, that'd clear it.

Regards,
Mike

I'm getting perfect prints now from QImage. The solution (step 2) is a bit odd so will continue investigation.

1 - Make sure printer driver color management is OFF (well, I knew that already)

2 - Under /Edit/"Preferences"/Color Management where you choose to have QImage manage color choose "Images" tab, then browse for the ICC profile to use. You can easily discover what this is by going into QImage's builtin image editor and selecting the "info" option on the right. You will find the profile ID for the image in question displayed in the report. Choose this from your browse and you are good to go. Easy. But why is the embedded profile not automatically used?

Thanks to all for the recommendations that got me thinking outside the box.

Best wishes,
JH