Well guys here's a little interesting story about printing. My partner is a Pastel Artist and we have decided to set up a Print and Sublimation Business to sell copies of her work as well as taking in work from other sources. After a fair bit of research we purchased a used 27" Mac as my 24" died sometime ago and for printers we have bought a Ricoh SG 3110DN with Sawgrass Inks along with a flatbed press and a mini 3d vacuum press for sublimation work as well as a wide format (17") Canon IPF5100 for reproducing Fine Art Prints.
All has been going well with the iMac and Ricoh combination although I did have initial setup issues but the nice peeps at Sawgrass were very helpful and got me started with really good results, I did have a bad batch of 6 x 8 tiles from BMS which saw the start of many hair tearing out sessions over ICC profiles etc! again the nice man at BMS (Scott) sorted out a replacement batch so everything at the moment on the sublimation side is looking good.
I think I'm becoming a bit of an expert on ICC Profiles, setting up Photoshop and general colour management as working with the Canon 5100 has been a nightmare until tonight!!!! but more on that in a mo....
For my partners Pastel Artwork I've set up a temp Photo Studio so as to control the conditions as much as possible, I'm using a Nikon D3200 with a Nikon 35mm primary Lens. 2 x Continuos Softbox Lights, Good Tripod and a totally dark room. Shooting in Raw format and editing via Photoshop CS6. When checking the photos in the Raw plugin I'm getting a light reading of 5050 as shot which with a little tweak I can bring it up to 5500 which is what the bulbs are. The photos look great with a 45 - 50 mb file size but then I go to print oopppssy. now the problems start.
Whatever settings, calibration, profiles I'm using I seem to be getting prints that are tinted with yellow, tried al sorts, been surfing the web, checking forums, talking to people but nothing seems to work. I've run print after print after print on a variety of papers to no avail. Bear in mind some of the 17" paper works out at 6 -7 quid a metre, so some expense involved which one could do without.
So back to tonight, I cam across an old post on an Apple forum with a number of people having the same problem and not just with Canon printers but Epsom and HP. One guy even had a 2hr session at his local Apple Store with an Apple software genius using his equipment and failed to resolve the issue. So i dug out me old HP Laptop, loaded one of the photos into Photoshop using very basic colour management and produce a stunning 16" x 20" print with about a 97% colour accuracy to the original painting.
The sad thing is I've used Macs for years, there great for video editing and I always thought that they were the Bees Knees for graphics but I'm going to sling it on Ebay tomorrow and look to buying a decent quality PC with a graphics monitor and see where we go from there.
If anyone can recommend a good PC Monitor and or setup then please let me know as it could save me a whole heap of time.
Thanks for reading, Rant over
John (ICC Profile Master)