Photo printing from Affinity

[General Disarray]

Few things in this world are more aggravating and frustrating than photo printing. If you don't do it all the time, you typically buy a new printer every few years, print a few useless prints until you find the right settings, and move on. Then years later that printer stops working, you buy another one, and here comes another set of wasted paper and ink, except that this time, it's the very expensive ink from Epson, so I want to put my hands around Joe Epson, shake him and tell him: "Stop ripping people off with this overpriced ink, damnit!!!"

So my good old Canon Pixma MX922, which I bought for $80 in 2016 gave me many years of good photo and Blu-ray prints on cheap ink, but eventually gave me the B200 and decided to die.

Since I still need disc printing, and that seems to be, along with discs, a thing of the past, I had to spend over $200 on one of the few remaining consumer printers with that ability, an Epson XP-7100, for which generic ink is sold but voids the warranty, so for the first year I'm forced to use their insanely expensive ink. And I wouldn't really mind a lot if at least the prints were excellent and very similar to what I see on the screen, obviously with the difference between photo paper and a self lit medium like a screen.

But no, the printed photos have the gamma all messed up, or something else, but they look way darker. And I'm sure it's something that I did wrong, but the Canon always gave me decent prints if I did things this way. So I would like to show whoever's nice enough to help me and knows about this stuff, all the steps. 

This is a RAW CR2 from a Canon EOS 60D DSLR, as I see it when opened in Affinity Photo 2 (updated to the latest version):

This is after having developed it in AFP, which as you know, opens in the Develop module when loading a RAW photo. I didn't do much to it, but this is what I ended with, and more or less what I would like to see in the printout. As you can see in the info pane at the bottom right, I converted it to the Epson XP-7100 Photo Glossy color profile to see on screen something as close as possible to the final print.

This is how I setup the print options that matter to quality:

When I print that, I get a photo that is much darker than the source. And not because I'm comparing a print to a screen, I've seen photo prints before with many printers and I know what the difference is supposed to be. So just to give you an idea, I scanned the printed photo, and then adjusted it to look as close as possible on screen to what I see in the printed photo:

As you can see, it's much darker, but I guess I left the Epson scanning app to some auto thing, but Epson software is aggravating, and I was lucky to get anything at all because it would freeze and do nothing at all. If you see the curve I applied to get it to match the photo, I believe I brought down the gamma quite a lot.

Another thing worth mentioning is that because I thought the Canon printer was going to last much longer, at one point I bought a lot of 6x4 Canon Photo Paper Plus Glossy II. I doubt this has anything to do, it's not the first time I print to photo paper from another company, and usually it's about the same. 

So I'm sure those of you who know about these things found about ten different things I screwed up, so if you know a lot about this (not wild guesses please because this ink is insanely expensive), then please tell me what did I do wrong, and how to make it so I can get the best prints I can with this machine. I really don't want to start printing photo after photo trying out different things because I will be down $100 before I know it.

Thank you!

 

[Dan C]

Hi General Disarray,

This page seems to have all the ICC profiles for your printer for soft proofing before you print:

https://www.zedonet.com/en_download_colorprofiles.phtml?printer=Epson_XP7100series

For some information on how and why to soft proof, please check this video:

Lee

[General Disarray]

3 hours ago, LeeThorpe said:

Hi General Disarray,

This page seems to have all the ICC profiles for your printer for soft proofing before you print:

https://www.zedonet.com/en_download_colorprofiles.phtml?printer=Epson_XP7100series

 

Thanks Lee, but it says there those are profiles to be used with their PrintFab product, which costs $49. Definitely not going to pay more than these overpriced cartridges. This machine should give me a near perfect print without external software.

I'll watch the video later, thanks!

[General Disarray]

On 3/28/2023 at 7:10 AM, LeeThorpe said:

For some information on how and why to soft proof, please check this video:

Lee

So I had not included that in my post because it was already a bit long, but I had done the soft proofing. What I see on the screen when I apply that layer has nothing to do with the printed photo.

Either Affinity Photo is sending the wrong gamma, or the printer driver is.