Epson ET-8550 Velvet Fine Art Paper settings uses Pigment and Dye Black

[ThrillaMozilla]

Hi @ThrillaMozilla
To solve you particular problem, it might have been better to start a new thread as it might get buried here.
That said, sounds very frustrating and yes with the right settings and profile you should not have that level of a problem.
Since you are likely a expert on this already and way ahead of me, please don't take my comments as too low a level (they are yet you did not give details) yet I will mention all that come to mind that can cause this problem.

- Are you on Mac or PC. If Mac, make sure you are not using their AirPrint driver as opposed to the official Epson driver.
- There is always the potential for conflict between the software controlling the printer or the printer controlling the settings from the front panel. I prefer settings from the software to insure settings stick and are easily visible.
- I know its basic yet do you have Black Point Compensation turned on
- Are you using the version 2 Profile from Red River for this paper. That profile became available in January 2025.
- What media setting are you using. Here is a link from Red River on recommendations for media settings for that paper:
https://www.redrivercatalog.com/download/32-premium-matte-double-sided-recs.pdf

- And lastly are you using perceptual rendering? Let me show you the curves in the Red River ICC profile for relative colorimetric vs perceptual. The almost flat line on relative colorimetric is concerning

Relative Colorimetric:



View attachment 17191

Perceptual
View attachment 17192

Again excuse the lack of my expertise yet I know sharing details both direction can help forum members help you better in solving your problem.

John Wheeler

I think I owe everyone a follow-up.

I contacted a Red River technical support person, and she was very helpful. A single shadow adjustment in Gimp ameliorates the problem, and as a bonus, it's a local contrast adjustment that I didn't know about. I'm now using the Velvet Fine Art paper setting (with my own profile) that Jose Rodriguez and Keith Cooper mentioned. The Red River profile and recommended settings seem to work as well or almost as well.

Nevertheless, I don't think the BPC and perceptual rendering systems are working quite right. Matte paper offers pretty good blacks (beautiful, actually), with a reflectivity reportedly around 2%. I have the pictures to show that matte paper can reproduce the pictures I want. The problem is that I have to make large manual brightness corrections. The profiling and printing software seems to handle this automatically for glossy paper, but it works poorly with some matte paper, and it doesn't even use all the range of black tones.

I made some measurements on my own images, and I see that there has been a lot of other discussion about this that agrees with what I found. I have a hard time understanding why the monitor does not give a good representation of the print appearance, because I have the prints to prove that it can.

I'm not sure where the problem is, but there is some interesting discussion on ArgyllCMS that may be helpful if I can get that together. Here are this and some relevant references:
https://torger.se/anders/photography/argyll-print.html

https://www.printerknowledge.com/th...ion-gives-composite-black-when-checked.15740/

https://www.printerknowledge.com/th...i-to-produce-excellent-printer-profiles.6878/

https://www.printerknowledge.com/th...acking-dark-tones-compared-to-ccstudio.16373/


EDIT: I'm considering using Relative Colorimetric rendering with no BPC, so it is at least reproducible.