I recently had to reinstall windows xp on my pc. Getting my Epson 2100 and Photoshop PS7 to work nicely together is proving daunting.
From inside PS7 when I try to print, I'm in the 'Epson Stylus Photo 2100 Properties' 'Main' menu. Under Media Type, I'm only getting a few media types: plain paper, archival matte paper, watercolor paper (radiant white) and CD-R.
I remember on my previous installation I had it set up so that it would show all the correct papers, archival matte, glossy, premium semigloss. I got these paper profiles from http://tech.epson.com.au/downloads/product.asp?id=stylusPhoto2100&platform=w2k&submit=Search%2B%3E%3E.
Multiple web sites say that all I should need to do to get these paper profiles installed is drag them to c:\windows\system32\spool\drivers\color
But like I said, that does NOT make them show up in the "Media Type" pulldown menu of the Stylus Photo 2100 properties window. The only place I can see them is on the Print menu under "Print Space" if I change the profile away from 'Stylus Photo 2100/2200', I can choose any of the paper profiles.
This is NOT how I used to have it working. It used to be that I kept the Print Space Profile as 'Stylus Photo 2100/2200' and controlled the paper type from inside the Stylus Photo 2100 menu.
Any ideas how I can get this working again?
Answered Revealed.
A helpful guy at Luminous Landscape mentioned, "You probably already know this, but just a guess: do you have the matte black or the photo black cartridge installed? With the matte black only a few media will show up, like what you've listed."
His remark made me second-guess myself. I had remembered the Media Types showing all the paper types regardless of which cartridge I had installed, but maybe I was wrong. I switched out the matte cartridge for the photo black cartridge and sure enough the Premium Semigloss and the Glossy paper types were now visible. Curiously, the Archival Matte was still listed.
As a test, I replaced the Photo Black cartridge with the Matte Black cartridge. Now the Media Type showed all the papers, Archival Matte, Premium Semigloss, Glossy Photo Weight, etc.
So I guess the full answer is that the Epson Print Properties window only loads the paper profiles when the correct cartridge is in the printer, but once it's been installed once, it doesn't remove them, regardless of what cartridge is currently installed.
Epson 'Photo Quality Glossy Film' (SO41107)
A6 sized (105x148mm 4.1x5.8") paper described 'Durable, bright white film sheets' 'Use for photographs' 'For brilliant Photo Quality color with the highest gloss finish' 'Use with EPSON 720/1440 dpi print mode'
Results were quite good I thought. Much less bronzing than on the shitty Epson 'Photo Paper'.
The instructions advise selecting 'Photo Quality Glossy Film' and if that Media Type is not available, 'High Quality Glossy Paper.' I only have the HQ Glossy Paper option. It apparently worked fine.
The paper has a corner notch cut in the upper right hand corner when looking at the shiny printing side. This is peculiar and not nice if you are, for instance, mounting these prints on a black background.
Price was 8SGD (4.57USD) per 10 sheets.
I would use this paper again.
Epson 'Photo Paper' (S041255)
100x150mm paper described as 'Glossy Photo Paper for low cost, high quality digital snapshots. Printing with the 'Photo Black' ink cartridge, telling the print driver it's "Glossy Paper -- Photo Weight" and printing for Quality, not Speed.
The results sucked. The bronzing was overwhelming. At certain angles I can almost make the entire image disappear. Colors were not strong and contrast limited. Highly not recommended
Price was $11.20SGD for 20 sheets.
I've had a lot of frustrating starts and stops with my Finke Race photos -- problematic scans, problematic printers, problematic web displays.
On 31die's wise counsel, I went for quicker&smaller&rougher on pictures I scanned for the web. I chose to spend my energies working on high quality prints instead.
It was a great payoff -- the prints' color, sharpness, exposure are coming out extremely well. Much better than any of 72dpi webpage scans.
I've been printing A3 (297mm x 420mm) photos this evening and the resolution is beautiful. It makes me curious how much more I could blow these out -- they are looking great. At these A3 dimensions my images are 365 pixels per inch. My understanding is that as long as they're bigger than 240 pixels per inch, I'm in very good shape.
Learned a few more lessons about the Epson 2100 and Photoshop 7.
1) I think it is always good counsel to clean the ink cartridge before you do a round of printing. Yes, theoretically it wastes ink, but I only print perhaps a few times per month. Invariably the nozzles plug. I end up wasting the ink anyway, as my first photo turns out a banded, wretched mess.
2) I was fucking up Image Resizing for printing. I was leaving 'Resample Image' on -- this was producing lots of bogus resolution. As well, I was leaving the 'Maximize Image' selection on. Epson explicitly warns that this can lead to ugly banding and other crap effects.
So now that I am comfortable with my print output, I can start looking more artistically and editorially at some of my photos and make some nice displays.
Wheeeee
Here is my workflow...
1) slide image of some green plants growing on orange desert rock in warm sun.
2) scanned w/ Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 w/o any modifications.
3) pull it into Photoshop 7, run 'auto-contrast', which is all it seemed to need.
4) print out the photo on an EPSON 2100 w/o any other adjustments than making it the desired size (28cm x 10cm) Used epson Archival Matte Paper and epson inks.
Problem is that the printed photo doesn't have the same color as the slide.
The image in Photoshop, and on my monitor, looks much closer to the slide than my photo.
So the problem in the workflow is in printing the image, apparently not something I am doing in photoshop.
It's hard to describe the problem without showing you the digital image and the printed image.
a) dynamic range between brightest to darkest seems compressed. I guess this will always be, compared to a slide or monitor.
b) the colors are off. Especially the green. Something like 'the green is washed out and maybe a bit too green.' The colors are somewhat flat, and a bit 'primary'.
I had the idea that maybe I needed more saturation, so I turned that up +17, but the output still had the 'flat, primary color' look to it.
As far as I know, the print settings regarding paper, quality (high), etc. were all selected properly.
Ideas on what the solution might be?
I can say this: if the printout looked as close to the slide as the image-on-monitor looked compared to the slide, I'd be totally happy.
I've been terribly slow in turning my photos from our trip to Kerala into presentations, either web or printed.
Last week I arbitrarily started on a scrapbook based on the photos I took around Kochi's Chinese Fishing Nets. When I printed the first photo at a modest 8" width, I was dissapointed to see that it wasn't pleasingly sharp.
Where's the problem coming from?
I used Kodak SW-100 film, which has very fine grain, a Canon 100-400mm lens with image stabilization, scanned the slide w/ Nikon Super Coolscan 4000's maximum resolution (4000 dpi), did next to no modifications in Photoshop, and printed it out with high resolution on the Epson 2100.
All of those steps were reasonable; where did the workflow break down and give me medicore sharpness?
Start with the source. I checked the slide with a 4x loupe. It looked quite sharp; an excellent image. But 4x isn't much amplification. So I dragged out my Leica Pradovit slide projector and viewed the slide as a three-foot wide image. There was the problem! The image just lacked natural sharpness to begin with. In low afternoon light I'd been standing 50 feet away. Although the image is ok, it's not tripod-sharp.
Comparing the print and the digital image of the slide to what I was viewing on the projector screen, the sharpness complaint was clearly originating with the photo, not some later step in the workflow. (This is not to say that I'm not introducing sharpness problems later on in the chain, just that the source image was the pareto cause)
Correcting the image
So to make this a presentable image, I'm going to have to use Photoshop's sharpening capabilities. There are scores of lousy, conflicting tutorials presenting a huge gamut of techniques ranging from super-simple to enormously tedious.
So my current project is to figure out the right way to sharpen this image into its most presentable state.
Resolution
Almost universally, tutorials have warned to apply the unsharp mask on an image that is already adjusted to the final output resolution of the printer.
Ok. Fine. What should that be, then?
Epson says my printer has maximum resolution of 2880x1440 dpi. So this is suggesting that the dots are twice as wide or twice as tall? Why is its printing resolution an area unit (2880x1440) when the Nikon Super Coolscan 4000's resolution a one dimensional unit (4000 dpi) ?
Photoshop :: Image :: Image Size also presents resolution as a one dimensional unit. (in the case of my scanned image, it calls it '4000 pixels per inch')
My pessimistic guess is that I cannot even assume that Photoshop's "Pixels per inch" is the same as my printer's "dots per inch"
What I need to figure out is the function that maximizes the quality of the Epson printer print, while not creating a needlessly bloated image (where photoshop creates 'fake' picture detail just because I forced it to be a certain resolution) given the following inputs and outputs
inputs
sc_scan_resolution: the resolution I tell the Nikon 4000 (sc) to scan with. (in dpi)
ps_pixel_width&height: photoshop settings under "Photoshop::Image::Image Size" units "pixels"
ps_document_width&height units "inches"
ps_document_resolution: units "pixels per inch"
This review of Epson 2100 was interesting, and points out the differences from the Epson 2200.
A Huge, Heavy, Solid Beast With Some Flimsy Add-Ons
I dragged home the enormous 3'x4'x10" box and started unwrapping my Epson 2100 Inkjet.
It's a big, heavy machine. Some of the add-on trays, roll feeders, and sundry attachments do look a bit flimsy. A good whack on them would probably do some costly damage.
The printer itself looks damn solid though. The paper advance has scores of small little rubberized wheels with tiny teeth. It all has the look of very high accuracy. It should -- the machine prints bandless color.
Machine went together pretty quickly. The dearth of printed documentation is a little irritating at first, but once the software drivers are installed, the CD-installed documentation is good enough. I wouldn't say it's especially thorough.
One annoying omission is that they don't provide a USB or Firewire cable to connect the printer to the PC. This is a $1400SGD printer, and they don't skimp on the other components, so why not add in some cabling? Fortunately I had some leftover cables from other machinery. If I hadn't, I'd have been fucking steamed, sitting there at 2am with an unusuable printer.
The printer is way too big for the tiny little office space I have. Don't know how I am going to arrange things. Ling will not be pleased to find another 15% of her tuition desk encroached. She must feel like a Palestinian.
Basic Printing from Windows XP
I started out just trying to print out some small jpeg images on the free 100x50mm paper I was given. (Roughly the dimensions of a 4x6" photo).
There are at least two ways to use the printer, using PhotoQuicker, a small application from Epson which is basically a wizard to help you select some photos, adjust the print preferences, and send them to the printer. The second way is to just adjust those same printer preferences from any Windows application that has 'Print' functionality.
I first tried using PhotoQuicker, and printed out the picture incorrectly three or four times. I finally realized I was loading the photo paper incorrecly. (I was sticking it in wide edge first, instead of narrow edge). Regardless of how I set 'landscape' or 'panoramic' in the print preferences, the image was running off the edges of the paper.
Looking inside the printer during all this I noticed that there were ink droplets all over the place. No suprise, as the printer was spraying ink over areas it thought there was paper. This mistake is so easy to make (I figured the printer would complain if it didn't sense the paper feed adjusted to the correct width) that I guess it isn't that serious, aside from leaving stray stains here and there. There is a cleaning tool provided, so I will see if I can dab them away with that.
Once I sorted out the paper-feed orientation problem, it all went fine -- I made a nice, borderless print of one of my kerala photos.
I was a bit suprised to compare the earlier attempts. One of them had a distinctly stronger yellow and red element than any of the others. Compared under the same light, all the others had the exact same color output. My guess (hope?) is that in all my ignorant efforts to adjust settings for this printer, I picked the wrong paper profile, thus the printer was compensating incorrectly. I comapred them again this morning and saw the same thing. I had thought that perhaps the colors change during the 24 hr drying period, and that maybe the over-yellow photo was the first one I printed. Not so.
One other deficiency is that the list of Epson paper choices is incomplete. I can choose:
But, for example, the 100x50mm cards I was given are "Premium Glossy Photo Paper". In some screen shots in the documentation I saw the "Premium Glossy Photo Paper" listed as an option. Why isn't it available in my software? I tried turning off the 'marginless' printing, but that still didn't make the premium option available. It prints out fine using the Epson Glossy Paper setting, but these materials are expensive, and Epson stresses how important the correction combination of inks and paper are. I'd feel more comfortable if I could exactly identify the paper stock.
One other issue I had was in printing the Benneton/Sisley photo. Regardless of how I configured the print preferences, I could not get the printer to fully maximize the photo within the bounds of the paper. It probably used 90% of the area it could have. When I printed another picture later (on some roll-fed paper) the printer happily made the pixels big enough to fill up the page. I don't understand why it wouldn't do this for the Benneton/Sisley photo. Perhaps the image has some invisible pixels that make the photo bigger than it appears?
At any rate, the print output is truly as good as any photo lab would produce.
Oh, also, I has trouble identifying the roll of free paper inside the printer preferences. It's a 329mmx10mm (13"x32.8") stock. I guessed A3+, and that seems to work. Curiously the box is labelled, "for use with: Epson Stylus Photo 2000P and Epson Stylus Photo 1270." Epson gave me this paper specifically with my 2100, so I guess it is fine, but little inconsistencies like this always trouble me.
Very Uncertain About Fine-tuning the Printer Controls
Basically the printer does what it wants to, or at least what it defaults to. I need to better understand how to control the dimensions with which the printer prints the images I feed it. I also need to understand how to exercise good color control.
Controlling the printer dimensions is just going to take some experimentation. I just have to admit to myself that I am going to be wasting some fairly expensive paper this weekend. But that ultimately saves me paper once I can regularly make one-shot-one-kill prints.
I'll only focus on controlling the color proactively once I figure out the other stuff. The default color output seems to match quite closely to what I see on the screen. Perhaps I am just lucky in this. I'll give it further study later.
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Followup...
Already found some answers...
Turns out there are some differences between the 2100 and 2200. One important one is the paper support. There are a number of papers only supported in North America.
I don't know what the point of that is, or if it is correctable. But at least now I know why I couldn't find the 'Premium Glossy' setting in PrintQuicker...
I decided to investigate the Epson 2100 (The asian name for the Epson 2200 photo printer) on a very serendipitous day.
I went to the Epson 'exhibit center' at Funan IT Mall and saw all of their high quality photo printers on display. They had some staggering products -- wide carriage printers that take 4' wide roll photo printer, producing bandless images derived from ultra-high resolution drum scans. These pictures are 4'x3' and have resolution better than the average 4x6" print!
At any rate, I saw the Epson 2100, which was my target, and was duly impressed. It turns out this weekend there is an IT Fair at Singapore Suntec City Convention center ( 3 minutes walk from my office ) and they were running a good promotion... $1481SGD, including one roll of semi-gloss paper, a packet of A3 paper (A3 is bigger than A4, but similar aspect ratio), and a complete extra set of the seven ink cartridges.
I priced this versus some of the shops at Funan, and found that with the addition of the ink packs ($17each), the promotion beats the average store by about a 100$. Furthermore, there is no hassle about using a credit card or else paying a non-cash tariff, etc.
Turns out the price isn't all... The service was outstanding compared to the normal Singapore retailer, and especially a convention exhibit retailer! [I went to another IT Fair a few months ago. HP had hired the most shockingly incompetent salespeople ever. The had no knowledge of their products whatsoever. Their flyers were crap. And despite their generation, they spoke the most wretched English imaginable. Shocking]
Anyway, these people were great. They processed my order quickly, and when the free dolly they give with all their bulky purchases didn't fit the enormous 2100 carton, the boss packed it up on his own dolly and walked it to my car and helped me load it. And unlike his competitors at HP, he knew an extensive amount about his products.
This sale goes on thru Sunday. Since I got such excellent service, I should give these folks a plug...
The fellow that helped me was 'David Liao.' The Epson distributor working this fair was Diversitec Distributors Ltd. Reach David at 9853-2012 or 6468-3888.
I'll give a review of the printer after I use it this weekend, but what I've seen so far is very encouraging.