Ian Lyons: Printing on Epsons with Lightroom 1.3.1 on Mac OS X Leopard

Ian Lyons has posted an excellent tutorial on printing in Leopard with Lightroom 1.3.1. He's specifically targeting the Epson range of printers using the new 6.X range of Printer Drivers.

"This tutorial will concentrate on what is known as application color management, which basically means that the ICC profile associated with a particular paper/ink combination must be selected in Lightroom rather than the print driver itself. Also, since the tutorial is intended to be useful to new and existing Lightroom users I will also include some of the basics associated with Page Setup and saving Print Templates."

Read the whole article.

A silly ID Plate trick

I've well documented little workabouts for various different things using the ID Plate. Usually things it was not intended for, like Print borders or Copyright symbols.. Well here's thing relating to the ID Plate that I've found this evening. Pardon me if it's common knowledge, but hey, I'm like the kid who added the extra note to the pentatonic scale and created a new rock guitar scale.
I was shooting a CD cover for someone today, and after I send off the selected image with a bit of retouching, I got to thinking about ways of adding text to an image in Lightroom. Of course this made me think immediately of the Identity Plate. I typed in the name of the artist and a title. Yes! Well except they're together on one line. It looks okay, but I'd like to have it with the name on the top and the title on the bottom. I'll need 2 ID plates, so it's not possible.

I click on the ID Plate editor and place my text cursor after the name and try a few modifier keys. Aha!

I find something that works. I used Option+Enter (Ctrl+Enter on PC-From Adler in the comments) and the title jumps to a new line. So I use the shortcut a few times until I have the gap I need. Finally I use the scale and hand tool to get the text where I want it. Now I'm not advocating a text tool for Lightroom, but it would be nice to have movable text in Print, not just at the bottom of the image!

Possible Profile solution for HP printers on XP

In this Adobe U2U forum post, U2U member Joe Soaper outlines how he solved his Lightroom Print issues with his HP printer:


After much sweat, tears, cursing, and perusing of the related print quality forum threads, I seem to have solved the issue which resulted in vastly different prints from LR when compared to prints using the same colour management settings in Qimage.

I'm using an HP D7160 with HP paper & ink, and the supplied HP profiles for the media (Premium, Premium plus & Advanced paper types) but was getting a virtually posterised output from LR, even after setting the correct profiles and allowing LR to manage the colour settings.

I also tried allowing the printer to manage settings using ICM - and the result was even worse than the LR output.

However, I stumbled across a web reference to .icc & icm file suffixes for profiles. The latter suffix is needed by windows to implement the profile - and it appears that the HP profiles (installed from their driver CD) had dumped them into the windows profile folder using the .icc suffix.

Changing the the suffix from .icc to .icm solved the problem and resulted in accurate prints from LR using application managed colour settings.

I have no idea why, when the profiles worked in Qimage when they were still listed with an .icc suffix - but changing to .icm now results in acceptable prints from both Qimage and LR.

Hope this of help to all those others on the point of taking a baseball bat to their printer

Other ID Plates uses.

John Beardsworth has a great followup post to my recent video post on borders.

"Sean McCormack's latest Lightroom video shows how to add a decorative border to a print. He's using the Print module's ability to overlay an image other than the identity plate.

I noticed the same feature when I was writing my Lightroom book, but didn't think of a decorative border. Instead I came up with a more prosaic application - adding a copyright symbol to contact sheets, using a transparent tif file for the symbol. Funny how people find completely different uses for things."

Making and Using Borders in the Print Module.

As we were painfully aware throughout the Beta cycle, there was no way to add borders or frames to our precious prints in Lightroom, bar a 20 pt stroke. Well through the genius of Andreas Norén, we have found and tested a way. Sid Jervis up at Lightroom Extra has detailed one way of doing it. Here I present a way to do it in Print, without affecting your current ID Plate (that's the clue!). I'm also including my frame for you to test this.

But what about the 60px limit on Graphical ID Plates, I hear you ask? Well this is not an image limit, it a size limit based on the height of the ID Plate in the Module picker. Bigger than this and the ID Plate will not fit. But as we're not using it this way, the size doesn't matter.

Side note: I edited this in Garageband, but it threw a hissy fit so I've left in my patented 'Okays' and left out the new little jingle I wrote :(.
Update: I managed to figure a way to get rid of most of them, but no new jingle :)

OS X printing with different printing setups using Presets.

One feature that's very cool for printing is the ability to have multiple paper/printer combinations stored inside presets. There is only one trick to it though, which people can miss.
Okay. Lets start by picking a template we want to modify. I've chosen Fine Art Mat for this (should that be Matte?). I've modified and added my Identity Plate.

Next I choose my Printer Profile. I click on 'Managed by Printer' and select Other.. from the drop down menu. This allows me to select a profile to add to the list. I then click Printer and select my Epson 1290 from the list and setup the photo settings recommended by Ilford for the Smooth Pearl I want to print with.



Normally with a profile you would turn Colour Management off, but Ilford recommend a particular colour setting so I've set that. Here's the trick. Once all this is set up I hit Save. This saves to the Standard print setting. This is the key step.

Now that this is done I save the Preset.

I've also done this for another printer: The Canon CP220 6X4 printer. This has no profile control and no colour control but I've still saved it as standard. I've then modified the Fine Art Matt again for this Printer. Finally I've saved a new Preset CP220 FAM.
If you have followed this, you can see that there is a different printer in the capture from each preset. If I switch between them the print settings also change to reflect what I set as Standard for that preset.