When you purchase a photo inkjet printer, the manufacturer will supply you with a set of ICC profiles for the papers they make. More on this in the media type section below. Thus the need for ICC profiles specific to each printer, paper and ink combination. For example, some cotton papers are very smooth (hot press papers), while others have more texture (cold press papers).
Photo papers (glossy, semi-glossy, satin, luster, pearl, metallic) and matte papers (cotton, canvas, alpha-cellulose, bamboo) have many different surfaces – a cotton paper will absorb ink much more readily than a glossy paper.Įven within a given category (photo or matte), paper coatings vary widely as does the surface texture, or tooth, of the paper. Figure 1: ICC profile plot of Breathing Color’s Vibrance Baryta paper on the Epson 3880 using PK ink Matching a Paper Type With an ICC Profile They are created by printing numerous color swatches on the paper to be profiled, measuring the swatches on a device such as a spectrophotometer, then comparing the results to known reference targets and making necessary corrections to achieve color fidelity from input to output. Simply put, these profiles (small text files) contain instructions on how a given make and model of printer, using a specific ink set, should spray ink on a particular paper to achieve color accuracy. ICC stands for International Color Consortium, a group of industry vendors/color experts who first established the standardization of an open, cross-platform, color management system. The proper application of quality ICC profiles is one of the most critical elements in the printing workflow. Let’s begin by first addressing common areas of confusion: ICC profiles and media types.
At the end of the post, I will go over how to calculate proper paper thickness settings for Epson printers based on caliper specs from manufacturers’ paper data sheets. In this post, we will review these often overlooked settings when working with third party paper or mixed media paper and discuss the differences between them. These settings include (but are not limited to): media (paper) type platen gap (Epson) or head height (Canon) and paper thickness (Epson).
When printing on non-OEM papers, there are several important settings that may need to be manually configured in your printer driver dialog box in order to avoid common problems and ensure optimal prints. While this keeps the printing workflow fairly straightforward for OEM papers, it presents certain challenges when printing on third-party papers since paper characteristics such as coatings, weight and thickness widely vary.
When choosing a OEM media (paper) type in your Epson or Canon printer driver, the software automatically determines and configures the optimal settings for the selected paper. Since Epson and Canon sell branded papers designed to work with their printers, media settings are only programmed into the printer driver software for those papers.
Use this guide to get up and running with your own third party paper printing. Producing an optimal print, however, requires proper configuration of an array of printer driver settings for each particular paper. These papers range from glossy, luster, metallic and baryta photo papers, to fine art cotton watercolor and canvas matte.Ī few of the choices include OEM papers offered by printer manufacturers such as Epson and Canon, as well as third-party (non-OEM) papers produced by companies such as Breathing Color.Ĭolor-managed applications like Photoshop and Lightroom, in conjunction with quality ICC printer/paper profiles, pave the way to achieving good prints. In the digital age, we are fortunate to have a bounty of wonderful inkjet papers to choose from.