Chicago Botanic Gardens-0797

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

After years of sitting on the fence about having a full size (17″ wide), professional printer, I finally gave in and bought an Epson Pro Stylus 3800. Click here for some gratuitous printer porn.

It’s simply amazing.

But quite honestly, the issue of buying the printer was far less about deciding which printer to buy, but how to navigate my way through the maze of issues that come from matching a print to what you see on screen.

The numerous reviews of the printer pretty much guaranteed that it would be a winner (9 ink carts, 80ml ink capacity, automatic matte and glossy media switching with minimal ink loss, 17″ wide media). The 800lb gorilla in the world of printing is deciphering the fifty plus opinions on how to match a print to your monitor.

Well after a relatively painless few weeks, I think I can safely say that I get it now.

And by get it, I mean, I can get my prints to look pretty damn close to what I see on my monitor.

Here were some of the obstacles along the way:

Q What does calibration mean?
A It means that devices like monitors, printers, cameras etc all are displaying images reliably.

Q What does ‘calibrate my monitor’ mean?
A It means that you get your monitor to take some tests that prove that what colours it thinks it’s displaying are truly the colours it’s displaying. The simplest way to do this is make your monitor perform a few minutes worth of tests, unsurprisingly a ‘monitor calibration tool’, like the X-Rite/Greytag Macbeth Eye One Display 2.

The part of the test that surprised me the most was just how damn bright I had set my screen. No frickin’ wonder all my prints always turned out so dark! I’d bumped up my monitor(s) to twice or three times what it should be.

Q Does the printer need to be calibrated too?
A It depends. (Don’t you hate it when the answer is ‘It depends’. Ugh)
If you have a printer that is from an established printer maker, a la Epson, then there’s a pretty good chance that there will be lots of people out there that will have made it easy for you to not need to calibrate your printer. Now here comes the tricky part. Calibration is really just a slightly more confusing way to explain something called ‘profiles’.

Q I’ve heard of ‘profiles’. What the hell is a profile and how does it relate to calibration?
A OK. Here’s the real meat of this whole topic now. A profile is a set of instructions (for a device) that tells it (the device) how to display a colour. And the clever part is this: it tells it how to display with respect to what kind of device it is. A profile empathises for the device itself.

For a printer to reliably display its colors, the printer has to have a profile which takes into account a few things that are totally specific to that printer. In fact, the profile even takes into account the paper on which it will be printing on to. Which really makes sense, since a matte paper will soak up ink in a totally different way than a glossy paper.

So, for a printer that profile takes into account: the printer model itself, the number of inks available to it, the kind of ink it’s printing with, then finally the paper on which it will finally be printed.

For a monitor, when I talked earlier about calibrating it, I was just glossing over the fact that I was in fact making a profile for it. The profile took into account the kind of monitor it was (laptop LCD, desktop LCD, CRT), the brightness, the gamma point (I still have no idea what that means) and then a set of parameters for Red, Green and Blue output.

Q Ok, now I’m more confused than when I started. What does all this have to do with printing?
A Well done, you’ve now fully entered the maze. The next part will help us now get out.

The reason anyone gives a shit about profiles, calibration and the rest is because it all comes together when you finally press Cmd/CTRL - P.

Q So… what happens when I press ‘print’?
A I am going to assume that you are going to be printing in either Photoshop or Lightroom. I have never used Aperture or really anything else, so bear with me. Both programs have about a million control dialog boxes that appear when you go to print, plus a few that you might not have seen otherwise.

Well there are really only a couple that are important and if you get these set right you’re golden. And rather than hacking my way through the explanation, I’m going to show you the video that I saw that made all my questions fade away. Russell Brown is about as Photoshop as anyone gets and if you can get over the eccentric voice patterns, his explanations are top notch. Here’s where he explains how to print from Photoshop to an Epson printer (an old R2200).

Ok, I’m going to summarise anyway because when I got my head around which parts of these vital dialog boxes meant, it all became a million times clearer.

When you go to print, not only are you choosing which image to print today, you’re also choosing which profile to use for that image. And while it can sound tedious to choose a profile every time, if you’re printing a session with glossy paper, there is really no need to change the profile.

But really after some reflection, I think what is most satisfying is that each time I print out an image, I get a tiny bit more confidence with the system. I get the sense now that each print will be pretty damn close to what I see and that the results are going to be repeatable each time.

So, in very fast summary:

1 Calibrate and make a profile for your monitor. This is the foundation of all your images. If you’re adjusting images in Photoshop/Lightroom and your images are 300% brighter than they should be, all your work is for nought.

2. Get a reliable printer which has lots of freely available profiles. I would recommend Epson as the majority of user generated internet support out there is for Epson printers.

3. Set Photoshop/Lightroom colour space correctly.

4. Choose the profile that matches the paper that you’ll be printing on. This step implies that you’re picking from a list of profiles that are made for your printer. Choosing a profile that matches your paper but not your printer is retarded. The list will be organised for your printer first, then paper.

5. When in the printer’s own dialogue box (the final dialogue box usually before the printer starts printing) make sure to turn OFF the colour management. This makes sure that the image isn’t being ‘managed’ twice.

6. Finally make sure the printer is choosing the right paper stock so it matches up with your profile and the paper itself. This part might sound like the printer is profiling again, but it’s actually much simpler than that. It’s just making sure that it knows how to handle the paper thickness.

Ummm, I think that’s it. Now go print!

Here are some of my references I used to gather all this info:

Russell Brown’s wacky world of Photoshop tips.
Eric Chan’s very thorough Epson Stylus Pro 3800 wiki.
Martin Evening’s Lightroom book.
Scott Kelby’s Lightroom book.