off color/density in printed contact sheets---what to do?

[joncrispin]

Kirk,  I do make contact prints all the time, and would love to be able to use PM for this function.  I am beginning to think this might be an Epson problem though.  I find even when making contacts from CS2, I have to lighten the images in Photoshop before I can get reasonable density on paper.  The R800 and the R1800 are basically the same printer, so there might be something going on there.  The only suggestion I could make for PM would be to have primitive density sliders in the dialogue box, so we could control exposure.  This might be too much to ask though.
I am about to buy a new printer, and I'll revisit this post then.  Meanshile if anyone out there is using a different Epson or HP printer, let us know what you are doing about this problem.

[Juerg]

Using several Epson printers, I have notized that if there is anything else than no color control AND color adjustments is selected in the printer set-up, Epsons constantly print too dark. I never tried to print contact sheets and therefore I'm not sure this option is avaialbe (I assume so), but it's worth a try.

Regards,
Archer

[Photo_op]

AH!     At Last.

I thought I was the only Epson printer owner (R2400 in this case) suffering from the dreaded printing "darker" than the screen view of photos. Through multiple iderations of CS2, CS3, Nikon Capture NX (and dare I say Photo Mechanic), I have NEVER been able to get satifactory contact sheet print matches (to the screen) unless I lighten the photos considerably. (p.s.- I've calibrated the screen using Spyder2 and calibrated the printer using PrinterPlus) I'm sure its just my particular ineptitude, but I am comforted that at least two other folks have/or admit to a similar problem. I was especially perplexed trying to print contact sheets, since it required that I treat each photo (i.e. 50) in order to not have the result seem like I was using the camera at night without a flash. My other solution was to use the program ImageBuddy for contact sheets. It has an option "Auto Level Color" that significantly corrects the "darkness" problem. I have no idea what it does - whether it applies some adjustment to match the lightest sample or whether it adjusts all individually...all I know it "works" the best to provide a viable contact sheet.

Thanks for the rant.

I hope this thread can shed some light on what the Epson  is doing wrong.

Dave

[jonbarber]

Things are looking UP.  Gary Harbaugh emailed this solution, and it works fine.

I found a way to control color and density with PM.  Using Mac you can apple
Print the contact as normal, but instead of printing directly from PM, make
a PDF of the contact sheets from PM.  Then open the PDF in Photoshop, adjust
color, lighten, darken, sharpen, etc. each page and print.....I have had
great success this way.

Thank you, Gary. It's sort of laborious but the result is what I wanted.  Photoshop has to rasterize the PDF, which takes some time on my little old eMac. When the PDF opened in Photoshop, the images looked exactly the same--fine--just as they had when viewing them in PM, so I didn't even need to do any adjustments before printing. The images in question were in a folder of selects that had already been adjusted in Photoshop anyway.  I then printed the sheet the way I would any image from Photoshop, and voila: a great looking contact sheet. The images now match those printed by Photoshop's Contact Sheet II, and with PM's much nicer and more complete labelling, and better image spacing.

I hope this solution helps identify what needs to happen in a future tweak to PM to get good results, at least with some Epson printers, when printing contact sheets.  Thanks to all who contributed.