… at least for me. As soon as I went from PS CS2 to CS3, my prints came out 1.5 or 2 stops too dark. Drove me nutz.
Search on the web, and I see I’m hardly alone. Call Epson, and they admit it… but have been working on a fix for nearly a year now. Sigh.
Then tonight, I’m determined to find it, and I start mucking about. One of the things I did was turn on print preview, with my chosen paper profile. And on a whim, I clicked on “Preserve RGB numbers” and saw exactly what the printouts look like: way too dark. A clue!
Off to Adobe help, where I find that the definition of “Preserve RGB numbers” is ” Simulates how the colors will appear without being converted to the color space of the output device. ”
Hmmm… is it possible that the output is not be converted to the printer’s color space for some reason?
If so why, and what can be done about it to fix it?
Off to look at my profiles… to discover that I have two full sets of Epson 3800 profiles… one at /Library/ColorSync/Profiles and another at /Library/Printers/EPSON/InkjetPrinter/ICCProfiles/Pro38.profiles.
Hmmm… do I have a conflict here? Should not be, but on a whim, I delete the batch of profiles at /Library/ColorSync/Profiles, and head back over to PS to see how thing work now.
And the result is… “things work now!”
No more excessively dark prints.
Is this the reason that it was so hard to find? Double profiles? Some had them and some didn’t? (The ones at /Library/Printers/EPSON/InkjetPrinter/ICCProfiles/Pro38.profiles are, in fact, inside that package, so not very obvious.)
Did I find it, or were the gods just smiling on me? Taking pity?
See if that is your circumstance; see if that fixes it for you.
Good luck!
hi, thanks so much for the tip.
i had the same problem. however for me it worked to delete the /Library/Printers/EPSON/InkjetPrinter/ICCProfiles/Pro38.profiles. but that maybe from system to system different. now i got photoshop and aperture printing correct. lightroom however still refuses >:|
Comment by Sven — December 20, 2008 @ 1:21 pm
oh thank you thank you thank you for posting this.
Comment by jj — August 23, 2009 @ 2:06 pm
Hi and thanks also for this blog comment. It solved my dark printing issues with the Epson R1800.
Comment by Wayne — September 5, 2009 @ 11:51 pm
How do I access the area of my computer to delete these profiles? can anyone explain it step by step
Comment by Douglas — March 23, 2010 @ 9:00 pm
Doug…, as noted, the paths to the profiles I found are:
one at
/Library/ColorSync/Profiles
and another at
/Library/Printers/EPSON/InkjetPrinter/ICCProfiles/Pro38.profiles.
Visit both those folders and see if you have the Epson profiles in BOTH of them. If you do, then remove one or the other. (Remove = “Drag to the trash.”)
(Caveat: it’s now March 2010, and the OS has changed in the last two years. I no longer have that older version, and so cannot verify this for you. At the time it was posted, it worked, and judging by other’s comments, it worked at least up to Sept, 2009. YMMV.)
Comment by Tracy Valleau — March 23, 2010 @ 9:12 pm
You are computer literate. I am not. I do not know where to look for the folders or how to do the fix. please walk me through it step by step.
Comment by Douglas — March 24, 2010 @ 7:18 am
OK.
In the upper right-hand corder of your desktop, there is an icon of your hard drive. If you did not rename it, it is named “Macintosh” or “HD” or something like that. If you place your mouse/cursor over it and click the button twice (called “doubleclicking”) it will open up a window.
In that window you will see a list of folders. One will be named “Applications”; one will be named “Library” and one will be named “Users” – they will be others as well.
Double click on the one named “Library”. That will open a window. In that window will be a bunch of folders. One of those folders will be named “ColorSync”.
Double click on the one named “ColorSync”. That will open a window. In that window will be a bunch of folders. One of those folders will be named “Profiles”.
Double click on the one named “Profiles”. That will open a window.
(That is what is meant when one says /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/)
Look in this window for files with these names:
Pro38 ARMP.icc
Pro38 EMP.icc
Pro38 PGPP.icc
Pro38 PLPP.icc
Pro38 PPSmC.icc
Pro38 PQIJP_MK.icc
Pro38 PSPP.icc
Pro38 SWMP_LD.icc
Pro38 SWMP.icc
Pro38 USFAP.icc
Pro38 VFAP.icc
Pro38 WCRW.icc
Pro3800 3800C 3850 Standard.icc
Leave that window open. IF, and ONLY IF, we find a file we are looking for in the following steps, will we delete the list of files above.
IF AND ONLY IF you DO FIND those files listed above, continue on with the rest of the instructions.
If you do NOT find those files listed, then this hint will not be of any help to you. You can close all the windows, including this one. Your problem lies elsewhere, and you should NOT follow the remaining instructions.
Now we go back to the main hard drive, like we did above and we are going to look in a different place. That place is called
/Library/Printers/EPSON/InkjetPrinter/ICCProfiles/Pro38.profiles.
Here we go:
In the upper right-hand corder of your desktop, there is an icon of your hard drive. If you did not rename it, it is named “Macintosh” or “HD” or something like that. If you place your mouse/cursor over it and click the button twice (called “doubleclicking”) it will open up a window.
In that window you will see a list of folders. One will be named “Applications”; one will be named “Library” and one will be named “Users” – they will be others as well.
Double click on the one named “Library”. That will open a window. In that window will be a bunch of folders. One of those folders will be named “Printers”.
Double click on the one named “Printers”. That will open a window. In that window will be a bunch of folders. One of those folders will be named “EPSON”.
Double click on the one named “EPSON”. That will open a window. In that window will be a bunch of folders. One of those folders will be named “InkjetPrinter”.
Double click on the one named “InkjetPrinter”. That will open a window. In that window will be a bunch of folders. One of those folders will be named “ICCProfiles”.
Double click on the one named “ICCProfiles”. That will open a window.
In that window look for a file named Pro38.profiles.
NOW… IF AND ONLY IF you DO FIND that file named Pro38.profiles, we will go back and delete the list of files we found.
If you do NOT find a file named Pro38.profiles, then this hint will not be of any help to you. You can close all the windows, including this one. Your problem lies elsewhere, and you should NOT follow the remaining instructions.
If you DO FIND the file named Pro38.profiles…. AND you DID file the list of .icc files noted above, then proceed with the following steps.
Close this window. To close a window you click in the little red button in the upper left-hand corner of the window.
That should leave you with the window containing the list of .icc profiles.
If it does not, repeat the steps listed at the beginning of this reply.
Now, on the Macintosh there are two ways to delete a file, or group of files.
1) you can drag all the files to the trashcan on your desktop;
to do that you move you mouse/cursor over the file you want deleted. Press the mouse button down, and while holding it down, drag the file under the cursor to the trashcan on your desktop. When you see the trashcan highlight (it gets a little box around it) let go of the mouse button. The file will be gone from the folder, and will be in the trash can.
Do this for all the files in the list.
or
2) you can hold down the control key while also pressing your mouse button when it is over the file to be deleted. This will pop up a menu. On the menu will be a list of choices. One of those choices will be “Move to Trash”. To do that, to “move to trash” you slide the mouse cursor down until “Move to Trash” is highlighted and then release the button.
Once all the files in the list are gone and in the trash, you can close the window where they were.
Then click somewhere on the desktop, so that in the menubar you see “Finder” near the upper left-hand corner. Click on the Finder menu and select “Empty Trash”
You can always restore the default profiles by re-installing the driver for your printer, which you can get at Epson.com. (Profiles are included built in to the driver.)
Comment by Tracy Valleau — March 24, 2010 @ 9:06 am
I found and opened the folders following your instruction. I greatly appreciate what you have done. None of these files are on my imac. I have an epson artisan800 and an epson rx580. They are both useless for anything but black and white right now. Again, your help was greatly appreciated. you have gone to a great deal of effort.
Comment by Douglas — March 24, 2010 @ 6:01 pm
You’re welcome. Since this particular blog is about the Epson 3800, not the Epson Artisan 800, nor the Epson RX580, you could have avoided the issues by realizing that it was talking about a -different- printer. Dark prints almost invariably come from an incorrectly adjusted LCD screen. iMacs are -notoriously- bright and difficult to dim down to the proper level for photos. In short, it’s much more likely that your monitor is adjusted wrong than most anything else. The first thing I’d do is turn the brightness down as far as it will go. That won’t be enough, frankly. There is software that will let you dim it more, temporarily, such as “DarkAdapted.” Finally, you’ll want to visit the system preferences and click on the displays panel. Click on the color option in the bar, and then on the calibrate button, and follow the instructions there. Between those two things (dimming and adjusting) you ought to be able to get pretty close. Finally, if worse comes to worse, get a more experience Mac user over to your house, and have him or her adjust it for you.
Then, once that’s done, read thru this page at http://www.tracyvalleau.com/colorprofiles.html to understand what color profiles do, and how they work.
hth
Comment by Tracy Valleau — March 24, 2010 @ 6:20 pm