Maintenance and care Ecotank-2700

[Tyler Pickering]

Yeah I gave it a try it didn't really have the necessary options I needed to produce posters like Adobe. I've been using Gimp to try and edit the images and turned off color correction when printing to see if I can reproduce the nice image it gives me in uniformity throughout the poster. Goin back and looking at previous prints it has done this since day 1 even with my older printer. I'm not sure why the driver chooses to not match colors from page to page throughout poster printing but hopefully me editing them myself renders having to use color correction obsolete.Trying my 1st printout now using my settings wish me luck!

 

[Tyler Pickering]

Issue completely resolved. I will just have to manually fix all my maps before printing. Turning off the color correction feature completely fixes the color variation issue and as long as I do some gamma and other adjustments the printed maps seem to come out just as good looking as if color correction was on. Thanks to all you guys for your input and help with everything. I printed out multiple different maps just to make sure everything worked and it worked amazingly. So in retrospect is this a issue that should be reported to Epson about the driver? It is their color correction working through adobes poster printing setting that has an issue handling the colors.

 

[stratman]

I have tried to use Photoshop and Gimp to print the JPEGs but I cant get them to print the image as a poster over multiple pages. ( I haven't spent alot of time trying to figure out.)

It took me a couple minutes using Google to find how to use GIMP to make your poster: Gulliotine (or the Slice filter which may be a plugin).

Another search for this ability with Photoshop and I watched a brief video on how to use the Slice tool. Maybe there are other ways with PS as well.

Then there are the standalone apps Posterazor and Rasterbator I read about in my very brief Google search about GIMP.

I also watched how-to videos for each of these functions / apps.

Not sure why the created images would be difficult to print after creation although I did see a comment about issues using PS CS5.

Why go through all the extra work to force using Acrobat when other tools may be simpler and faster.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Did you find and try the poster option in the Epson driver - the multipage option - or doesn't it give you the enlargement you need ?

 

[Tyler Pickering]

The Epson driver doesn’t give me the options I need and photoshop and Gimp do have the options needed but it adds quite a few steps as all the images need to be resized at 91% of actual size which is easy in acrobat reader pro. I actually tried the rastebator program but found there seemed to be some loss of quality after slicing. All in all I’m happy to use GIMP to fix the image and print using acrobat with color correction off. It takes me less than 5 minutes to play around and get it done and that is fine by me.

 

[Tyler Pickering]

Here is an image for reference after I upped the gamma and played with color in GIMP. No variations from page to page at all and came out gorgeous. This is actually 12 pages put together on table.

 

[stratman]

all the images need to be resized at 91% of actual size

Why do they need to be resized?

Another fast Google search finds a batch imaging processing plugin for GIMP called David's Batch Processor (DBP). This will resize multiple images at one time as well as perform a number of other functions. Downloading of the file, instructions on usage and video how-to on the internet. Pretty easy.

Seems like you should be able to slice up an image and print it out as a multi-page poster with GIMP.

Same goes with Photoshop, though there may be more steps depending on what you want.

I have tried to use Photoshop and Gimp to print the JPEGs but I cant get them to print the image as a poster over multiple pages.

What is the specific issue(s) with printing using GIMP?

I figure you will be using Acrobat and fiddling with gamma points and what not to get the job done regardless of what I've written. That's cool. Use what you feel comfortable with. You do have an opportunity to help others, as you've been helped here, by explaining what you've tried and learned. Also, not everyone can afford the cost of Adobe Acrobat DC, let alone Photoshop, so it is good to know there are free applications that work for making multi-image posters.

I learned new things because of your questions. Your answers may help someone else reading this in the future. That's a good thing.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I upped the gamma and played with color in GIMP. No variations from page to page at all and came out gorgeous.

I get the impression that you consider your issues fixed and you found a practical sequence of steps/adjustments giving you good results. And there may be some additional steps, plug ins, modifications to optimize the flow overall as an additional exercise.

 

[Tyler Pickering]

Next weekend when I'm home from work I'm going to give your other options you've recommended a try. The reason the images need to be resized at 91% is that these maps are for a roleplaying game we play and 91% resizes the squares to be exactly 1 inch.

As far as the Photoshop/GIMP thing you mentioned about not being able to afford in all honesty I've found GIMP to be the superior program for me. Ease of use and the fact thats it free has I think helped it have alot more tutorials and advice on it due to the less restrictive nature of being free.

I've went ahead and dowloaded DBP thank you very much for that recommendation that is exactly something that is relevant to a few things I am currently doing.

The guillotine option is something that I did actually try I just couldn't get it to work right away at all so I just took the easy way and threw the image into adobe.

EDIT: I just watched a tutorial on the Guillotine function and technically it would work for what I need however it would make things quite a bit more difficult as I would have to actually measure the image after resize and do a fair amount of calculations to get it to print out in exact page sizes like Adobe automatically does. Definitely doable and If I didn't have Adobe I would probably go that route. I actually never knew Acrobat Pro wasn't a free program. I have it as part of my work suite and I guess I should be happy as it definitely isn't cheap either.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

You got a work flow now meeting your needs, and we just may evaluate some options to optimize it. Everybody gets used
to this or that software, I'm not familiar with GIMP, I'm using mainly PaintShop Pro for editing and Qimage for printing. But anyway, Epson drivers don' t vary very much over time and between printer models of a similar type. I'm coming back to the Epson poster option, you have a specific need for the size after print which makes this option useless as such, but you'll find addtional options on the extended options tab of the driver - a document scaling option - fitting to page - zoom to xx% - or centering on the page.
You may try the zoom option to reduce the image size somewhat , this in combination with the poster option 3x3 or 4x4 which may give you the 1 inch per square as you need it. If the 4x4 option does not blow up your image enough you can forget it - Epson does not have a 5x5....or any larger scale .