In Need of Printing Guidance

It turns out that my university is going to allow our photo club free access to the campus art studio. This means we'll be allowed to print as many of our photographs as possible. I'm a digital photographer, so I'll be using the digital lab (the dark rooms are available for club members who shoot film).

The digital lab uses Power Macs, G5s, G4s, etc and Photoshop (at the present moment, but I have yet to confirm this. I'll post again when I do.) The printers are EPSON Stylus 2000P. I'm under the impression that all I have to do is bring my own printing paper and my files and away I go.

Here are some of my concerns: I post-process all my camera files on my PC laptop. Will there be some changes in color from PC to Mac? Also, I want to print the color that I see on my screen and I know that sometimes if your setup isn't correct, the print won't match the screen. How do I go about matching print to screen display?

These questions basically relate to colour management and I suggest you do some reading around the topic.


If you work on your PC and embed an ICC profile in your images, things should be correct on the Mac setup. Monitors need to be calibrated and profiled to a known standard for images to look the same - the use of D65 (6500K if your calibration solution doesn't support D illuminants) and 2.2 gamma is standard. You really need a colorimeter based setup to get things to that standard, but if you use the manufacturer's profile for the monitor and Adobe Gamma, you'll be fairly close.

A word of warning - laptop screens aren't the greatest, largely because of the limited physical space and power available for the backlight. There's often no manufacturer's ICC profile for the panel. I use Monaco OPTIX XR Pro, which tells me that three of the Gretag Macbeth ColorChecker colours are out of gamut on my laptop screen, and that overall the screen doesn't calibrate as well as my desktop monitors.


For the printing side of things, you need to print using an ICC profile valid for the paper and ink combination you're using. This should be fairly straightforward if the printers are using manufacturer's inks - buy paper for which there are profiles for that model of printer. I'll leave the advice on which papers to buy to those who use Epson printers - though you aren't limited to Epson papers. You can use third party papers if you have a profile.

There's information on printing on Epson printers using ICC profiles here, and more information about rendering intents here. If the university are giving you the ink, that's rather generous - when I was at university, we had to pay by the page for everything we printed with the university supplying both the paper and ink (or toner), though I'm talking here about routine printing, not use of specialist photo printers.

David

The only thing that I can add to what DavidW has already laid out, is that the ICC profiles are probably easier to find and download than you might think. Start by looking for them through the paper manufacturer's Web sites. Several paper manufacturers have the ICC profiles for their paper and many models of Epson printers available for download at their web sites.