[Glastonbury] gimp printing

[Ian Dickinson]

On 6/7/05, Douglas Phillips <dougcamel at clara.co.uk> wrote:
> Anyone know how to set up a printer (epson stylus photo 870) so that its
> printing matches the screen colours in Gimp? I get duller print outs and
> banding.
Banding is likely to be a problem with the print head or cartridge. If
your print driver has a 'clean cartridge' operation you can try that -
it basically prints a saturated colour image to try to shift crud off
the print head. You can also - at your own risk - try taking a cotton
bud dipped in some ethanol (pure, not beer :-) and try gently wiping
the print heads. Most manufacturers tell you not to do this, but if
you're careful you may be OK. If you have a windows machine around,
it's often the case that the windows drivers have a set of useful
tools (like cleaning and priming the cartridge) that the linux drivers
lack.

Failing that, pop in a new cartridge. Don't buy the cheapo refills -
the ink in them is rubbish. If you're doing high-value work, use good
quality paper too. Unfortunately, recycled paper is particularly bad
at holding a decent ink image, due to the way the fibres are affected
by the recycling process. For printing photos, use photo paper.

For precise colour matching, you're basically out of luck. There are
lots of differences between a crt screen that emits light and a paper
surface that reflects it. The perceived colour of ink on the page is
greatly affected by the colour, quality and texture of the paper, the
type of ink used, the ambient light conditions and the way your brain
processes colour information from the eye. I believe that professional
graphics designers have (no doubt expensive) tools for calibrating
their monitors to a given print sample, but as far as I know us mere
mortals have to make do with looking at the printed output and
tweaking the picture a bit until we get a satisfactory result.  As a
rule of thumb, the more expensive the printer the better the result is
likely to be.

That said, the gimp has tons of plugins so for all I know there may be
one for making the screen image be a better predictor of the printed
output. Scout around and see what you can find.

Ian