Miscellaneous Tips
Outgassing - the problem & solution
I've never found outgassing with utlrachrome prints to be a big problem - maybe because we keep the office reasonably warm? It's generally much more of a problem with semi-gloss and gloss papers, and I use mainly matte, so that might be the explanation. For those of you wanting to understand the porblem and come up with a solution:
From the net:
Outgassing has been covered in great depth in the yahoo EpsonWideFormat
group. Many times. Did I say "great depth?" Search the archives and see for
yourself. Weeks and weeks worth of postings.
The outgassing problem comes from pigment ink base. It uses glycols for
clogging performance and glycerins to help evaporate the glycols once
printed to the substrate. When the work gets framed it vastly restricts air
movement at the print surface (which is one of the points of framing, yes?).
Then the gallery lights (room lights, sunlight, whatever) heat the print.
The glycols evaporate off the print but have nowhere to go, so they condense
out on the nearest cool surface in the enclosed space. And you end up with
an oily mess on the inside of the glazing.
The only way to get them off the substrate after printing is heat and air
movement. It's a fantasy, unsupported by science, that close proximity to
"absorbent paper" is going to make low volitility molecules evaporate from a
substrate. I know Epson said it, but that doesn't make it right.
Interestingly, this is a problem with pigment inks in general. I have this
same problem with PiezoTone inks. And yes, it does happen with HPR and other
matte papers.
The cure is a hand held hair dryer. Low heat, high fan. Works like a charm.
Lacking that, keep the print warm and let it get plenty of air. Hanging in a
warm studio for a few days might be sufficient. I've heard that six weeks in
a cold studio in winter wasn't enough.
Side effects of driving off the glycols and glycerins include increased Dmax
(as much as a full stop with PiezoTones) and gamut (slight but visible with
UltraChromes). This is one of the reasons that the print from yesterday
looks better than you remember it ;-) Think of the changes you get from
drying an inkjet print as the equivalent of highlight drydown of darkroom
prints.
Epson 2400 and loading thicker papers
A few of our clients have mentioned problems getting thicker media (like Photo Rag 308) to load in an Epson 2400. Here's a tip we were sent:
- load the paper carefully on the right guide, this one is critical.
- Then, help the paper down with your palm low on the paper guiding it flush with the right hand side.
I had just been applying pressure to the top of the sheet. This new technique appears to work better, I got the HMR 308A3 through first try!!
And another method:
- Load the thick paper in the rear slot lining the paper up flush with the right guide. Push paper gently from the top and maintain light pressure. The printer will eventually realise there is paper in and the paper will drop down a small amount after about 7 seconds. Still maintain the light pressure as it moves down a few more centimetres a second time (again about 7 secs after the first move). Maintain light pressure till it moves the third time, then the paper is loaded. This now works 99% of the time, I regularly put A3 and A4 sized Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308gsm through…..
The South African method of Ink Swapover on 7600/9600
How to change the photo/matte ink in the Epson 7600 and 9600 printers without using the costly Epson draining procedure:
1 – Make sure your printer is not switched on
2 - Open the ink cartridge lever in the ink cartridge bay
3 - Replace the photo black cartridge with the matte black cartridge (or vice versa)
4 - Leave the ink lever open !
5 –Using the printer control panel go into Maintenance Mode 2 by by switching power ON while pushing the 'Paper source', 'Cut/Eject', and 'Paper Feed down' buttons.
6 - Press the 'Paper Feed down' button until you see "SERVICE CONFIG" on the display - press the 'arrow right' button. It then shows 'XXD' in the lower part of the display.
7 - Press the 'Paper Feed down' button until you see "NPD" - press 'arrow right' button. A value of '1' appears in the display.
8 - There are 3 possible value settings for NPD:
0 - no ink check
1 - pigmented ink (there should be s star "*" at this setting)
2 - dye inks
9 - Change NPD setting to '0' (no ink check) and press "Enter" - a star should now show next to the '0' value
10 -Switch printer off
11 - Switch printer on
12 - Close the ink lever in the ink cartridge bay
13 - Printer and driver shows the matte black ink is installed (or photo black ink)
You can use the same procedure to switch from matte black to photo black or from photo black to matte black.
What happens is that once you change the ink in that way the printer
re-sets the 'NPD' value back to '1' the next time you switch on the
printer in the normal way (non maintenance mode).
At that point the previous black ink, either matte or photo black, has not been flushed our of the printer. Here is what you need to do to flush the remaining ink:
A- With the 7600:
The 7600 uses approximately 10 to12 ml of ink before the previous black ink is flushed out.
1 - Create a 23"x 40" image in Photoshop and fill it with pure black (RGB 0,0,0).
2 - I use inexpensive matte paper and print that image at 720dpi.
3 - When you look at the finished print you will see that 2/3 of the print is photo ink as it looks a little bit dull and the rest of the print shows the nice dark matte ink.
4 - When this image is done printing the ink line is charged with matte black (or photo black).
B – With the 9600:
The 9600 uses approximately 20-22ml of ink before the previous black ink is flushed out.
Use the exact same procedure as described above but create a larger image: 43"x40".
This larger image is needed to flush the longer ink lines of the 9600:
1 - Create a 43"x40" image in Photoshop and fill it with pure black (RGB 0,0,0).
2 - I use inexpensive matte paper and print that image at 720dpi.
3 - When you look at the finished print you will see that 2/3 of the print is photo ink as it looks a little bit dull and the rest of the print shows the nice dark matte ink.
4 - When this image is done printing the ink line is charged with matte black (or photo black).
Change Blacks on the 7800
There is a thread on DPReview here about this. Personally it sounds a bit risky to me. I just bought two 7800s instead!
Great way to hide email address on web pages from spammers
This is a great email encoding tool.
Determining the printable side with cotton rag papers
This depends on your eyesite a bit. If you're short sighted and/or have good abilities with close focussing, it's quite easy just to see the difference - one side is the raw fibers, the other side is slightly smoother, the coating being over the top of the fibers. However, this doesn't work for everyone, so here are some other ways to work it out:
- The first is the curl - generally, coated papers will curl slightly upwards towards the coated side. Certainly with all the Hahnemuehle papers this is true.
- If you still can't tell, there is the 'tacky test'. With a moist finger, touch both sides of the paper - the coated side should be noticeably stickier.
- The final way of telling is to do a print! Use the same image, print it on both side of the paper - you'll soon know which is the correct side (the one without the ink bleed!) and you can use this as a reference for the rest of the box!
Loading Crane Cards in the Epson 2400
Most people seem to get them to go through fine, but if you're having trouble here's what Crane suggest:
First, verify that you have set up a user defined paper size in the printer driver. The Epson driver asks for size measurements in units of either 0.01 cm or 0.01 inches. For example, if you are using the #9 size card, the width would be 7-3/8" which would be put into the printer driver as either 1873 (.01) cm or 738 (0.01) inches. If you have already done this, you may want to try adding or subtracting a 0.01 or 0.02 since the card may be slightly different. These printers have a paper size sensor. If it doesn't see the right size paper, it will not work. In the larger printers like the 4800, they have an option to turn off this sensor. I don't know if this is an option on the 2400.
Get rid of clogs!
If you're not a daily user of your inkjet printer, you'll sooner or later run into the problem of head clogs. The best way of keeping your printer running clog free is to use it everyday. Now of course, you may not want to print every day, but if you leave it too long the inks in the head can really dry out, settle in, and become a major clogging issue.
One solution it to use a program to automatically print an image each day to keep things running smoothly. Should use less ink than a series of head cleans overall, and keep frustration at bay.
You can download some software to help you with this at MIS inks.
(Incidentally, while I am not a big recommender of aftermarket inks, in general advising people to avoid them, if you're tempted to run a CIS system, then I'd definitely consider MIS. They seem a very straight forward company with good testing behind their wares and a solid reputation for quality - there CIS system and inks are better than anything I've ever come across in Australia by a country mile!).
Printing from iPhoto using Colour Management via Colorsync
While most profile's are used with explicitly ICC aware applications like Photoshop (indeed the entire Creative Suite has explicit ICC colour profiling, many of you have asked how to use profiles with application without the option of specifically choosing a profile in the printing dialogue.
One of our clients, Bruce Bowden, has very kindly written up some notes on using profiles with iPhoto. The method should be the same for all applications on a Mac, in principle. Incidentally, you can follow much the same approach on the PC by associating a profile for a printer in the 'colour management' tab of the printer properties.
Printing in iPhoto using an ICC profile.
In the Mac system level color management utility - i.e. Colorsync (found under System Preferences):
I found that the shotgun approach seems to work. The Canon i560 has 9
profiles associated with it. I assume that they are associated with
the different paper options in the 'Quality & media' menu. Since I
have only one paper type that I want the best possible output from -
Canson Photosatin - I replaced all 9 profiles with the image science
profile. That way I was certain that it would be invoked, whatever
media setting was used.
To print from iPhoto:
In the 'Quality & media' print setup I chose matte photo paper and
detailed setting at the maximum possible. These are the settings I
had already determined worked best for Photosatin on the i560.
In 'Color options' I selected Colorsync. I then saved these settings
as 'Canson Photosatin colorsync'.
Printing from iPhoto then simply required choosing the 'Canson
Photosatin colorsync' setting. The output appeared indistinguishable
from the Photoshop output. (at least to my untrained eye.) It was
certainly much better than previous iPhoto output. The blanket
replacement of existing profiles means that iPhoto will only produce
accurate output when using Photosatin. If I wanted it to work with
multiple papers, I'd have to go to the effort of matching profiles to
paper types in the menu instead of just replacing them all. However,
a quick test showed that, even for other papers, the Image Science
Photosatin profile was better than the stock profile.
In the process of working through all this I had already discovered
that my camera (Pentax K100D) had a colorspace setting so I set it to
'Adobe RGB'. I then used the 'Image Capture' program on the Mac to
tag all images coming from the camera as 'AdobeRGB'. Prior to that
they were coming in as 'CameraRGB' whatever that was. I also set up
iPhoto to add the colorsync tag when it imported photos from the
camera. It uses whatever tag was defined in Image Capture.
These settings, along with setting up Photoshop's colour preferences,
should mean that I now have a well defined colour workflow from
camera to printer.
The starting point for all this was your very informative web site
and, of course, the profile. I would have absolutely no hesitation in
urging anyone interested in getting the best output from their
printer to follow the same route. (and now you can set up your mum's
PEC-12 and where to get it
Pec-12 is non damaging, archival, film cleaning product and the best option we've found. Used in conjunction with PEC pads (very soft lint free disposable wipes) we've found no better product for cleaning film.
It's not cheap but a little goes a long way.
If you're desperate for some, fast, Nu-Lab have it here in Melbourne (well, sort of in Melbourne - it's well south of what I think of as Melbourne proper).
However if you can wait a few days, these guys are much cheaper:
Good source of PEC products
Cheap source of IT8 targets for scanner profiling
If you want to calibrate a film scanner, you need a reference transperancy.
The best are the Hutch colour targets, but they are VERY expensive: Hutch Colour Targets
Otherwise, you will use the industry standard IT8 target. This will give you 90 percent of the results of using a Hutch colour target for about 20 percent of the cost. Kodak and Fuji make these, but a guy in Germany makes good ones for reasonable prices:
Wolf Faust Affordable IT8 Targets
Once you have the target and reference file (ie a file that says what the target colours should actually be), you scan the target and compare it to the reference. From this a translation table (ie profile) is made between what you got (ie the colours in your scan), and what you should have got (the actual measured colours of your target).
Higher end scanning software typically has an IT8 calibration routine built in (eg Vuescan, Silverfast). If not, we can use Profilemaker to build the profile for you here - contact us about this.
Roll Paper Use With an Epson 3800
While the Epson 3800 does not have a roll paper feeder many user's purchase 17" rolls and cut sheets from this (as many papers are not available in A2 or 17 by 22" size).
The 3800 will happily accept any user defined sheet size up to 17" by 38", so is still a perfectly suitable printer for panoramics.
The biggest problem with roll paper is, as ever, curl. This can be a big problem with the 3800 as it does not have a vacuum sucking system to keep the paper flat during printing, as the bigger models do. This can lead to visible smudges occuring due to head strikes when the paper curls up towards the print head.
However, roll paper can still be used, the trick is to get it flat enough:
We have found that roll paper does work okay if you leave it to
flatten out by itelf under its own weight for at least 5 days.
Putting a weight on top does not seem to speed the process up.
We will continue to use roll paper, In future if we need to do a
quick print we will add 20mm to the length of the piece and any
smudge can then be cut off. The printer still spits out the full
length of paper even if it is 20 mm longer than the length set in the
print driver. If we are able to plan we will cut the paper in
advance and leave it on a flat surface for 5 days and then print. (A
better solution would be for Canson to supply A2 sheets of photo satin).
Do not be put off from selling roll paper to customers just pass on
our lessons and the work around.