Archive for category Mac
Solution for Epson 7600 printing in Snow Leopard
Posted by therider in Mac, Photography, Software on September 30, 2010
In the previous post I have outlined a trick to print correctly from Lightroom. While that works, LR has a weird crop issue when printing. So I continued my search to find a fix with PS.
Thanks to Doyle Yoder from a Luminous Landscape forum thread (reply #18), finally I can print right again from PS CS3. The steps are:
1. Convert to printer/paper profile.
2. Assign sRGB profile, ignore the color shift as it shows on the monitor.
3. In the print dialog, choose “Printer manages color”.
4. Because of above choice, “Color matching” in driver dialog will show “Epson color controls” automatically chosen and grayed out. Now choose NCA in the settings.
Voila. Perfect print.
Epson 7600 and Snow Leopard printing woes and solution
Posted by therider in Mac, Photography, Software on September 29, 2010
Brief update from my side is that I picked up a large format Epson Stylus Pro 7600 from a good friend of mine. As much as I was excited to own such a fine printer, I was bummed for two straight days not able to print a test image correctly from Photoshop CS3 on an intel macbook with Snow Leopard (10.6.4). I used the latest 8.19 printer driver.
I followed the standard process. Photoshop manages colors, with Bill Atkinson’s 9600 Premium Luster paper profile (9600PLU1), with Relative Colorimetric intent and Black point compensation turned on. Also NCA (no color adjustment) in the printer driver. Each and every print came out darker as if shadows quickly rushed to blackness. Also the black and white images seemed warm.
From numerous sources on the web I found out that the root cause is “double profiling” due to a bug in the print workflow. What happens exactly is that when we apply a profile in the print dialog in PS, and then go to printer driver dialog, the “Color Matching” section shows that “ColorSync” is automatically selected and is grayed out. This is not desired because ColorSync itself applies another profile depending on the paper, in my case, 7600-Premium-Luster-PK. the NCA option is also grayed out. This double profiling screws up the prints.
Many people have fixed it by pointing the default ColorSync profiles to “Generic RGB” as if it is a null profile. But it did not work for me.
Another source said to convert the image to the paper profile, then choose “Printer manages colors”, and NCA in printer driver. Very strangely, the printer just won’t print anything with this configuration.
Then I found out a very interesting fact that in Lightroom the application print dialog and the print driver dialog are on separate buttons. I had to choose the NCA on the driver dialog first (clicking “Print Settings…”), making sure that Color Matching is “Epson color controls”, the only alternative to “ColorSync”. Then I chose the paper profile on the right side pane before clicking “Print one”, and not “Print…”. If you click the latter, the color matching will be reset to “ColorSync” and you have to undo it by choosing “Printer manages color” instead of the paper profile and click “Print…” again.
The print finally showed shadow details as desired and perfectly neutral black and white.
It will still be a PITA to prepare images in PS and print via LR, but at least the prints will be right. CS4 or CS5 might have this particular bug fixed, but not sure.
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Various Epson 7600 related links:
1. Lesson: Printing Images Using an EPSON Pro Stylus 7600 / 9600 Large Format Printer and Adobe Photoshop
2. Lessons from using an Epson 7600 printer
Test prints:
1. On-sight
2. Bill’s downloads
Update: After getting the 7600 working right, the 2200 driver started giving problems. It won’t print and the utility app will not launch. After lots of research the solution that worked was to install the 2200 driver in uninstall mode before re-installing it. Then I tricked the 2200 the same way as 7600 to get it to print using paper profile and “Epson color controls”. The result came out better than what I was doing all along with “Printer manages colors” workflow. The grays are more neutral than the distinct magenta I used to get. It is still a little warm so I might still be using QTR for b/w but the color prints are gonna be better from now on.
Notational Velocity app really rocks!
I reluctantly tried what I thought to be yet-another-app-to-make-life-more-organized, after reading the post on notational velocity on the mnmlist blog.
Oh man, it really works for me! But ofcourse, part of the awesomeness goes to Dropbox as well, which I have been using since last month. Now I have few major winning factors with NV+Dropbox:
1. Esc and Cmd+L works very intuitively – almost no learning curve.
2. I chose to save the notes as plaintext files – no fuss editing possible from anywhere.
3. I keep the text files in a folder under Dropbox – everything is synced between computers and iPhone.
I only wish that the iPhone Dropbox app would let me edit the text files, but I think it is only a matter of time before that becomes a reality.
And yeah, no more stickies.
Solution for Cisco VPN Error 51
The Cisco VPN client occasionally shows an error dialog on a mac (Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem) when I attempt to start it, when the internet is working just fine. I found the fix in the following link which worked like a charm.
Specifically, this one line command did the trick for me:
Epson 2200 in Snow Leopard
Posted by therider in Mac, Photography, Software on January 27, 2010
The upgrade to Snow Leopard a few months back was smooth, except for one fatal thing. The colors from my Epson 2200 went from awesome in Leopard to downright awful, thanks to the third party Gutenprint driver. I only realized this mess today since I had been printing black and whites using the Quad Tone Rip (QTR) driver which kept producing neutral prints.
So I hit google and there it was, a pretty long forum thread on the very same issue. To my surprise I found that Epson indeed released Snow Leopard driver for the 2200 printer sometime in Nov 2009. I installed it, then removed and re-added the printer and voila, the colors are almost back to normal. The interface is actually much better than what I expected, and the advanced color setting panel actually worked (it was mangled up in the Gutenprint driver).
Now that I still had a little magenta cast (as opposed to horrible), I tweaked with the advanced color settings panel. Took down magenta to -9 and suddenly the grays started to look like gray. There is just one thing to be done in photoshop prior to printing. The brightness of the image has to be increased a little bit. A foolproof way to do this is to have a curves layer, with no adjustment, then setting the blending mode to screen with 50% opacity. That makes my color prints about same as what I see on my monitor. For black and white prints using QTR, the last step is not necessary, or maybe about 20% opacity will do.
Looking forward to some print sessions in the coming days.
Update: Magenta -12 works even better.
MAMP stop servers button doesn’t work
When you have to force shutdown your mac due to the sleep-wake hanging issue, the MAMP stop servers button stops working as well. The fix is simply clicking the preferences button, and then clicking ok. I picked up this tip from here: http://www.imventurer.com/2008/04/02/mamp-stop-servers-button-doesnt-work/
cdto – a nifty mac osx tool
In my digital photography workflow, I often need to use a shell in a directory fairly deep from the home dir. For example, I am at ~/Pictures/photography/portfolios/priti/2009-05-30-sf in the finder and want to cd to this folder at once. Found out two delightful options from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/420456/open-terminal-here-in-mac-os-finder
1. Copy an item from the finder using command-c, jump into the Terminal, type ‘cd ‘ and simply paste with command-v
2. cdto
The second option is working out perfectly for me.
The friggin’ mac is here !
Got my first ever mac – a shiny new mac book pro. And no, my wallet didn’t get lighter. Had a really long wait to get my POS windows laptop swapped to get this to actually use it for work. Did I say “work” ? Compared to the experience of using a mac, windows just seems a crappy environment to get any useful work done reliably. I had so many instances of the XP disappointing me at the times of need (slowing down, wireless acting up, freezing, blah blah) that I had to demote its use to only the Firefox browser 90% of the time. Even then I had to close it before putting to standby, else with 95.25% chance it would freeze up next day, wasting a good 30 min of my time.
At work, nothing could be better. I am now all up and energized to learn developing flash, and what is a better environment than OSX where everything works seamlessly. It is made for developers and artists and am loving every bit of it.
Now the mac is here, my dark days are gone. I am playing with it like a kid with a new toy, and not getting bored at all. The mac keeps stunning me with its interface and the fact that everything just plain works seems incredible. On the first day itself I took a bunch of pics using photo booth and made a fun movie using iMovie. What a hoot ! I am now thinking of taking actual movie clips along a storyline and try my hand at documentary making.
Here is the movie I made. Enjoy.
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Hi, I'm Joy, a Javascript engineer at Zoosk. While code pays my bills, I enjoy hang gliding, photography, motorcycling, woodworking and home renovation. Welcome to my blog.
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