Printing photos.

[ollypenrice]

I decided to branch out into printing my own photos and, perhaps, those of our guests. If you're interested, this is the story so far. (If you're an expert on this I'd really love to hear from you because my poor brain is already addled!)

The cost of ink cartridges made me go for an ink-tank printer. I don't want to have to agonize over whether to run off a print or not. I went for an Epson 15000 despite its limited 4 ink spec because more colours in a tank printer would have been way over budget. It can print up to A3 and longer, up to a metre, if given custom cut paper. Setting it up was easy.

Canon ended up excluding themselves by being unavailable and when I saw that Canon France themselves were out of stock of some ink colours I thought, 'No thanks.'

I bought a Datacolour SpiderX to calibrate my screen. It can't have been far out but I now know it's done.

First prints: very pleased but not there yet! Resolution is fine and the colours are fine, but  colours don't have anything like the saturation on paper that they have on screen. Accordingly I've been boosting the vibrance and saturation in Ps and Lightroom before giving them to the printer. Other things to watch out for are the contrast (gamma I guess) and the white point.  A modest boost in contrast and a slight reduction in exposure at the bright end give a better result. I think the prints run out of dynamic range at the top.

I'm going to switch to Epson premium photo paper to remove one variable, but it hasn't arrived yet so I'm on supermarket glossy for now.

Experiences and advice would be most welcome.

Olly

 

[Lee_P]

I print photos too (I'm a professional photographer) and also use an Epson XP-15000. (It has six ink tanks though, not the four you mention)? A top tip is that printers have profiles that match brightness, saturation etc. to the printer and photo paper that you use. This makes a *huge* difference, far more than you'd be forgiven for thinking. I use Epson Premium Photo printer, like you have on order, and it's great. I do all my printing through Lightroom, and it makes loading printer / paper profiles a breeze, (see screenshot below) plus has a soft proofing mode that helps you to match what you see on the screen to what will come out of your printer. Once you get all those things set up, you don't need to be giving extra boosts to vibrance and saturation.

 

 

[ollypenrice]

7 hours ago, Lee_P said:

I print photos too (I'm a professional photographer) and also use an Epson XP-15000. (It has six ink tanks though, not the four you mention)? A top tip is that printers have profiles that match brightness, saturation etc. to the printer and photo paper that you use. This makes a *huge* difference, far more than you'd be forgiven for thinking. I use Epson Premium Photo printer, like you have on order, and it's great. I do all my printing through Lightroom, and it makes loading printer / paper profiles a breeze, (see screenshot below) plus has a soft proofing mode that helps you to match what you see on the screen to what will come out of your printer. Once you get all those things set up, you don't need to be giving extra boosts to vibrance and saturation.

 

 

Bless you and thanks very much indeed for this, Lee. This will point me in the right direction. Colour profiling is on my 'to do' list but will have to wait for the paper.

My printer is an ET-1500 rather than an XP like yours.  I cannot find an Ecotank version of the XP 15000 , all the ones I found were cartridge with 6 inks.

Olly