I was a QImage user up until 2007, when I switched to Mac, and started printing out of Lightroom. I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard, and discovered that Epson has not actually released a compatible driver for my antiquated Epson R1800. So I installed VMWare and Windows 7 on my Mac, and have gone back to QImage.

Before the Snow Leopard upgrade, printing with the Epson driver's color management turned off, and the correct paper profile selected in Lightroom, my prints matched my Spyder-calibrated screen quite well.

Now, printing out of QImage under Windows, the driver set to ICM/Off, and QImage using the correct icc profile, my prints are coming out a good stop darker than my screen. But, if I tell QImage to let the driver manage color, and use Epson Vivid with gamma 1.8, the brightness level is just about right (note that my monitor is calibrated to a gamma of 2.2).

Any ideas what is going on? I did some searching here, and it looks like the standard answer to "my prints are too dark" is "your monitor is too bright", but trust me, it is properly calibrated, and again, when I had a working driver on the Mac side, printing with an icc workflow worked just fine, so I think there is something else going on.

While it may have worked for you on the Mac could it be that the "softproofing" of Lightroom makes the difference. If I google for softproof and Lightroom I see all kinds of messages. Read the threads on the Luminous Landscape forum for example. There have been upgrades though.
Drivers for Snow Leopard may not have been a solution either, there are color management issues with recent Epson drivers + Adobe software + Snow Leopard's Colorsync.

Not familiar anymore with Epson drivers but are the only choices CM off + on, or is there also a "let application do the CM" choice?
Your images have profiles embedded so Qimage doesn't (have to) assign a profile? A gamma 2.2 - 1.8 issue?

I didn't reply on this one for some days as it is always complicated to find the flaw in someone else's CM. Not to mention when it is about the difference between two CMs of the same person.


met vriendelijke groeten, Ernst Dinkla

Try: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wide_Inkjet_Printers/