[Glastonbury] gimp printing

[Douglas Phillips]

On Tuesday 07 June 2005 23:45, Ian Dickinson wrote:
> 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.
>
Banding dose not occur in Windows application. Colour matching is also 
variable in Windows, being better with Publisher say than Mirografx PP 8 
> 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.
>
Yes paper makes huge different but I cannot agree with you on inks. I have 
been using non Epsom inks for over 4 years with no problems.
> 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.
>
I cannot belive there is not some sort of scale that one could have printed 
out and on-screen and then adjust to match, after all this must be a common 
problem. I will have to delve further,
 Thanks,
 Douglas
> 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
>
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