Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2010/10/11
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Here is my experience learning to print from my Mac, an experience which may be irrelevant to the current discussion because I bought my iMac in the days of Tiger and have seen no reason to spend $129 to upgrade the OS. Well, there may be a reason, because Tiger won't run LR3, but so far I'm happy with LR2. Allegedly one of the advantages of LR3 is better noise reduction, but I bought NoiseNinja for the occasional ISO 2000 shots. When my wife bought a brand new MacBookPro this year, there were three "free" or almost free Epson printers to choose from as a bonus. Getting advice from a pro shop in my neighborhood, Bear Images, I chose the Artisan 50, a $100 printer on the basis that it used six separate color cartridges. Of course, this is strictly a non-pro printer, having an 8" bed. I do calibrate my monitor with the least expensive Spyder. After many horrible results, I discovered that if I chose ColorSync from among the three options, I actually got prints that were quite close to what I saw on my monitor. This seemed strange; I expected the choice of "Printer Manages Things" would be correct. Ultimately, poking around on the Apple goodies, I discovered that Color Sync was an application, a useless application, for creating a monitor profile by waving your hands in the air. So, it now made sense that "Color Sync" implied using the monitor profile. That cheap Epson makes amazingly good prints. When I set it at it slowest printing--a couple of minutes for even a 4 x 6, the print structure is so fine that it can barely be seen with a 30X microscope. That is gross overkill as far as the naked eye is concerned, but I still do it. As an interesting sidelight, a friend in England had a shot with really garish colors. http://www.flickr.com/photos/tug/4682114216/ Wanting to put it on his wall, he had a couple of commercial shops create prints on some fancy Kodak photographic paper. Just to show one-upsmanship, I made a letter size print on my cheap Epson and mailed it to him. The response was that my print was better than the expensive commercial prints he had gotten. For what all that blather is worth, Herb >I've spent days fighting the Snow Leopard vs Epson 3800 wars. >Right now I have it so that can print to my satisfaction from >Photoshop, but Lightroom (latest version) produces prints that are >insane. I've tried every suggestion in every blog in the universe, >and have reached the conclusion that Lightroom just isn't going to >be able to print until a new version comes out. > >So I'm researching AppleScript to see if I can throw together >something involving Bridge and Photoshop and AppleScript that will >let me print 50 pictures. It ought to be possible to print from >Bridge, too, but it isn't. > >PS: I use profiles for everything. Maybe I should try it with >"Printer manages colors" and see if that is any better. It's hard to >be any worse. > > > >_______________________________________________ >Leica Users Group. >See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information -- Herbert Kanner kanner at acm.org 650-326-8204 Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will pee on your computer!