Has anyone noticed recent color accuracy problems when printing with the v2 suite?

[Horseflesh]

I have a new and irritating color printing problem that I cannot yet figure out. I have a lot more tests I can do, but I wanted to ask the hive mind... If anyone else is doing color-accurate prints have you noticed any changes recently? This was working well for me a few months ago but it's blowing up now with AD v 2.11. 

What I am doing is printing to an inkjet printer with an ink manufacturer provided color profile. The AD color print settings look like this, and it's worked well for about a year... Until the last couple of months when I noticed color accuracy issues. 

I am not blaming AD, sincerely just asking if anyone else has noticed something weird. If so, great, that's a clue, if not I have many other tests I can try. The root cause may well be some Windows print driver nonsense. 

[Dan C]

Hi @Horseflesh,

11 hours ago, Horseflesh said:

This was working well for me a few months ago but it's blowing up now with AD v 2.11. 

I can confirm that Affinity Designer has not been updated recently, with 2.1.0 being released on May 18th & 2.1.1 on June 20th - so if this issue has only started occurring recently with no manual change to your Affinity app settings, then this would likely indicate an issue elsewhere on your system, such as the print drivers you've mentioned.

I wouldn't wish to say with certainty that the Affinity app is not the direct cause of this, however I'm not aware of any similar reports of issues from other users at this time.

One thing you may wish to try is exporting from Affinity, for example to PDF - then try printing this PDF externally from Affinity to see if the same issues occur. If not, compare the print settings used within Affinity to those used outside of the app to see if you can determine the cause for this on your machine.

Equally, if you have any older Affinity documents that you know have printed correctly previously, you might want to double check the document/colour settings used for this file in Affinity, to ensure they match the settings of the latest documents you've created that exhibit this issue.

I hope this helps!

[Horseflesh]

Thank you, that does help.

My issue is tough to figure out definitively because it's a workflow I built a year ago... And it worked great for months and months... Then I went for a few months without doing it at all. And when I resumed, I had this color problem. I'd have to try and figure out the date of my last successful print; I think it was probably late May. 

I can easily agree it is very unlikely that AD is to blame. It was always a very very long shot, but this issue has been vexing enough that I was grasping at straws. It may be as simple as my special inks have gone bad from age. That is just surprisingly hard to determine definitively. For example, the Epson print driver won't let me print with black ink only... Therefore, I cannot tell if the color shift I see in what should be a neutral grey is due to a bug or subtle settings error, or a problem with the inks themselves. What a safe age for the inks is also seems to be the subject of some debate.

So, I have to do test prints in different apps and OSes, and if they all come out the same way, I'll know it's the supplies. 

Anyway, thanks again, this did help. It will work out. 

[Chris26]

The first thing I would do would be to rule out the issue being with the print driver (or any other annoying windows update_ I always have those updates turned off by the way - never allow microsoft an inch of space within your printer environment), any I digress, silly question - have you done a test print from within the printer itself, a little cleaning and a little house work?  I once had an issue when suddenly I realise that my Cyan was faulty, had spent days blaming everything except the actual ink.  Just a thought.

Sorry Regards updates, I am referring to microsoft's unwelcome intrusion with their driver updates, they do more harm than good.  I am NOT refrring to Printer updates that are accessed directly from or for your model, this is different all together.  Just had to clarify.

 

[Horseflesh]

Ruling out Windows nonsense is indeed the first hurdle. I actually recreated the print setup on a different machine entirely, and on Win 11 whereas my normal machine is Win10. It had the same issue though, which doesn't actually rule out software problems. To do that I need to test on a Mac but it will be a little bit before I get to use one. 

The inks them selves look OK to the eye when I do a test pattern on the printer. However, these are sublimation inks so they do not take on their final normal CMYK colors until they have been heated. This additional step makes it even harder to diagnose where a color problem is happening. It is very possible to screw up your colors with over or under heating the transfer. I do not think this is happening in my case since it did work perfectly before and I am doing things to the manufacturer's specs.

There could be a weird problem like my heat press suddenly running at the wrong temperature. That's really unlikely... however... I should measure that to be sure. 

The manufacturer has been giving me good support, it will work out. 

And it still might be the ink having gone bad. I need to 100% eliminate software problems before I change the ink though as it is a huge hassle.