Pro9500 bronzing with IS inks.

[rodbam]

Joe I wouldn't know what colours the magenta affects. So far it seems to be the greens & some dark areas & in the parrots eye above the whole eye area is bronzed out, the red of the body seems fine.
What type of papers do you use for your pro 9500, can you use semi gloss or do you mainly use matte papers?

 

[The Hat]

Rod despite your bronzing problems the shots are truly beautiful and are captured very well,
Perfection can still be attained with 95% it doesnt necessarily have to be 100% as your photos clearly show,
I reckon a real bonzer.

Until you can get a perfect paper/ink match you can always revert to your trusty 9000,
anyway have at look in your locality for some HP 4x6 photo paper and do some testing on that.

Keep it coming mate..

 

[jtoolman]

Rodban I began to notice the bronzing when I began to subsititute a few of the colors gradually to IS. If fact it must have snuck by me as I really did the switching to IS very gradually. I did not even purge any of the carts. I only did a few sheets of Canon's Glossy on it when it was all OEM before immediately jumping to Red River papers and their ICC profiles during the transition and was marveling at the fact I was not seeing any shifts in color rendition.
So now that you have my interest, I will have to run some more tests with that printer as I have not used it much lately.
I am using IS Precission Colors on it.

Joe

 

[rodbam]

Thanks Hat & Joe I will look for some PP 6x4 to see what happens. I temporally put the flower shot behind glass to hang it where I hang my prints to see how the bronzing showed up & it was a bit disconcerting as you walk by it seeing the bronzing change & move. It looked perfect at night under the normal room light. Yes for my club competition prints I will have to use the pro9000 but I wanted to play with my new toy more
Joe I bought a spare set of empty PGI9 carts from Mike while I was using the OEM inks & when one OEM colour got low I changed the lot over to IS inks so the bronzing came in with a whack I look forwards to hear what paper you find prints with less bronzing, I'm stuck at the moment with the free Canon glossy & semi gloss papers I got with the pro9500 as me missus wouldn't want me to buy any paper while I have heaps here. We have to watch the pennies living on the old age pension a.

 

[jtoolman]

Hey I just printed an rather saturated and high contrast image on Kirkland Glossy ( COSTCO brand ) and though there is mild gloss differential, I do not see actual bronzing artifact. I do not see the brownish metallic effect on some colors as other papers have produced on other printers using IS inks.

I have to now run some more tests with some of my RR Glossy / Luster / Satin Papers.
I also still have a few sheets of Canon Photo Paper Plus II so I'll have to see how the IS inks work with the real thing!

 

[rodbam]

Joe thanks for doing the tests mate It will be great if you test with the Canon photo paper plus because they gave me two packs of Photo paper plus semi gloss & that's the two shots I posted here of the parrot.
What is the difference between bronzing & gloss differential Joe? Can you tell from my parrot prints if that's bronzing or gloss differential?

 

[jtoolman]

As far as I know, Bronzing has to do with the Metallic look that can sometimes occur. It tends to be only visible when you view the surface of the print at different angles. I see i sometimes on darker regions of the image. It will impart a bronze color to the surface though it may acually have gloss.
Apparently it has to do with the pigment particles not being absorbed into the surface of the paper coating ( I am NO expert in this area )

Gloss differential is most annoying to me. Simply is the change of gloss that occurs throughout the image depending on the color of the area affected.
My biggest gripe with IS and OCP inks is their Magenta pigment inks, Both Vivid and regular.
My best example is a picture of a couple of cars in front of an old Cafe. One canis white and one if fire engine red.
When printed on Epson Ultra Glossy with OEM K3 inks, the whole surface has the same level of sheen. When printed on the same paper but with IS or OCP inks the RED Car and anything that utilized any proportion of the two magentas, shows a much lower gloss level. In fact, the red car looksl like it was printed with MATTE ink.

These images do not show any bronzing, no metallic sheen. Just irregular gloss throughout.

It's hard to tell from your scanned images whether if is bronzing as tto really view the effect it requires that the print be looked at at an angle.

Great images though! Very nice work!

Joe

 

[rodbam]

Thanks Joe So far on my pro9500 prints (I've only done 4 so far) the problem areas seem to be in the greens & some shadow (dark) areas, the reds seem to look the same with OEM & IS inks. In the parrot shot we can see the green wing is bronzed out but the red body looks fine. I will have to print a lot more different coloured files to come to any conclusions.

 

[mikling]

There are ways to mitigate these issues to some degree. The cause as indicated in the links is quite often related to ink loads on the paper. One way to to adjust this is to intentionally shift the colors a little bit to see if it forces the printer so shift the ink loads to another denser channel. This sometimes works especially with printers that use the PC and PM /photo colors. Sometimes if the color is shifted a bit either by lightening or adjusting the color, the ink load changes quite a bit for a small shift in color. What you are trying to do at that point is to shift the use of PM or PC into M or C that is quite a bit darker. Or when lightening, dramatically less ink is used for a very small lightening when PM and PC is primarily used. For example on the R3000, when I was trying to flush out a light magenta line as well as magenta line, I could not find a pure color that used a lot of M but the printer used primarily LM as best I can tell. Thus any darkening of the color, primarily used more of the LM and hardly any of the much denser M.

Another test is to use the Canon profile on the aftermarket ink. Why? just to see if Canon has factored in paper ink loads in optimizing their printer profile. The printer mfrs spend a lot of time to optimize their media settings ( ink density/dry time) in combination with their profiles to match the papers they produce to give the best the printer can produce.

On more "pro" printers, or printers with a more controllable driver, there is the ink density ( amount of ink ejected) and dry time control ( most larger Epsons) that ideally should be tested when producing profiles. Generally, we think that we just print something out and profile it but that is actually only half or less of the story as we need to control and test what the ink limits are on the paper via the printer. This step is generally bypassed by most on profiling since it is a lot of work and most times is not really necessary. Also since the media settings change the ink density and dry time, then sometimes, a luster paper might be better served with a gloss setting.... as a start. It's not always predictable and trial and error is the only way I know.

When printing with pigment, even with Matte, sometimes you simply don't get good matches. ( Datacolor explicitly states that some paper ink combinations were never meant to be and to accept it, well I've been there. ) I have found that with matte paper, what prints well with one paper, turns out totally incompatible with another unless, the dry time between passes are ( impractically) increased dramatically. As it turns out it is an incompatibility problem, as the same ink with another paper does not have this issue at all. One could say bad ink as a premature conclusion because of the splotchy nature unless one had other papers to confirm and test the issue thoroughly.

I have also found some papers are excellent for dye ink and while "compatible" with pigment; results were not good. Lately I have given up searching ( like getting married) and come back to Premier Imaging Luster paper for my pigment output as that does the trick for reasonable costs. It's about twice as expensive as Kirkland (Kirkland is wicked inexpensive and in category of its own, really) but considering the amount I print ( not that much anymore...because I am testing less ), the extra cost is not a heavy burden.

 

[rodbam]

Thanks Mike that helps explain things nicely. I don't have much of a range of papers to choose from down here at prices I can afford, the discontinued Canon Premium fine art matte printed beautifully on the pro 9000 & at $47 for 20 sheets of 13"x19" I could manage that but most of the other fine art matte papers are over $100.
I will try a print using the Canon profile & see how that goes.
Is there any point in putting one OEM colour cart in the printer along my IS carts swapping out one at a time to see if it's one particular colour that is making the bronzing worse?