Having trouble with what appears to be solarization... dark - odd looking prints

InkjetMall Customer Support Piezography Inks & Printing
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Hi everyone. I’m new to the forum and to quad printing. But hopeful… I’ve loaded the printer, was careful to put the right ink in the right cartridge. That worked - all the new cartridges were recognized. In this order I updated the mac software - running 10.7.5 then updated the driver for my Epson 3880. Read the manuals (naturally and in my limited case - several times) and installed Quad Tone Rip - and then installed Print-tool.
Alas - following Jon’s very good instructions to the letter in his video, I’m still getting these dark - solarized prints. So I’m surmising that as written elsewhere on the net - that Apples Colorsync is somehow getting access to the Tif file and causing havoc. The only symptom or clue that I have is that in the printing dialog box that the driver (?) sends up… if I click on Color Setting Box (pull down) it notes that colorsync is doing the color matching NOT the quad tone rip. That’s I suspect problematic - no? I imagine that it is something basic - but I’ve spent a lot of time (and paper) fiddling on different options. So far no goal.

Anybody have ideas? I thought what I might do is upgrade the operating system to 10.9.x that should help. I looked at the colorsync utilities and “verified” the settings. Found 13 errors that were not correctable.

Any ideas? Many thanks in advance.

All best, Robin:

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Well - everyone. I figured it out. It was suggested that I print out the density step diagrams and that very much cleared it up. What I discovered was that the LK side of the step function was much too dark. Much too dark. So after looking all day for a software issue (including upgrading to 10.9.1) the mistake was clearly mine. I had (to save money - ha) kept the K3 LK cartridge in the K7 ink set. THAT clearly doesn’t work What was buzzing around in my mind was gee the K3 Conecolor would work with the K3 Epson set… But that obviously is something entirely different. Now the spectrum of greys is very smooth from white to black. So this was an interesting case in debugging. I want to thank Jon and actually Roy Harrington for being so responsive on what has to have been a holiday for many. Thanks guys!

Best,

Robin

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Thanks for the update, I’m glad you got it figured out and are now getting good/correct results.

Best regards and happy printing~ Dana :slight_smile: