Help on Roland fj540 profiles and media pls

[lovecanvas]

Photo to canvas printing

Hi all,
Boy oh boy do I need help, our shop was due to open yesterday but for a week I have been trying in vain.
Sorry for this manuscript, would you believe this is actually the cut down version

Purchased Roland printer, bad result with profiles
I purchased a second hand Roland Hi Fi Pro II fj540 that included a PC with Win2000 and EFI Best Colorproof XXL that is profiled for Sihl media. As I’m new to Rips I spent 3 days messing, trying out different Sihl profiles with the included canvas roll. I also installed the copy of Roland Color Rip included with the printer. I went through and did test prints with all profiles that had a canvas setting.
The results ranged from very light prints to very oversaturated. Also prints had terrible red or blue Colour cast. After switching to the Roland Rip’s generic canvas setting the results were more favourable, especially after adjusting the colour levels to reduce the colour cast. I knew adjusting settings for every print isn’t a solution but it did make me relax a bit more.

Looked for companies that sell water based media with profiles
I started looking for UK suppliers that sold Roland certified media and ICC profiles. It seems to me, Roland have given up on the water based media, but the best I could come up with was breathingcoloruk.com who sell media and then produce RGB profiles.

Found company, but need to print direct from Photoshop to Roland
I purchased 4 rolls of their Chromata White™ canvas rolls and now need to print and post them their colour profiling sheets so they can email me a RGB profile. They request the sheet is printed using the printers best most vibrant canvas setting without the use of a RIP.

Tried to print a profile sheet diect to fj-540 without use of a Rip
If I go to print from Photoshop, the two printers listed are XXL Rip or Roland Rip and neither work.
I setup a new port (with printers i.p and port) and tried this but it didn’t work. As the machine was setup for Ethernet but it also has a Parallel port I though I would dig out my old parallel lead and install the printer under LPT1.
After is installed the printer I tried to print from Photoshop, The printer flashed up a processing message for a second or two then it disappeared and no print.

If you have any advice it would be very, very much appreciated.
Kind Regards
Paul

 

[astro8]

If you go to the Roland website there is 125 meg of profiles for Roland Color RIP for that FJ540.

I've used Roland FJ's in the past with their rip and you should be getting very good prints straight out of the box.

Is it setup CMYKlmlc or CMYKOG? Is it pigment or dye?

Have you selected the right inkset?

Check your setups.

 

[astro8]

Found company, but need to print direct from Photoshop to Roland
They request the sheet is printed using the printers best most vibrant canvas setting without the use of a RIP.

Why the hell would you want to do that?

 

[lovecanvas]

Hi Astro, I know it doesn’t make sense not using the Rip but with 3 days of testing and bad results I am desperate to get my sample prints in my shop. My original printer choice for now was a reconditioned z3100 but as I found out the hard way many companies regularly advertise products as in stock only to suggest several other models.


The Printer has pigment ink, setup as CMYKlmlc in both the Rips I have tested. I will go to the Roland site as suggested and download the profiles and do some more testing.

Thanks, be back on a bit later

 

[TripleRock]

good color with my New (used... new to me) FJ540 is what I am goofing around with right now.

One thing I've been trying lately is giving it different types of files. pdf's seem to be over-saturated. I've taken that same pdf and rasterized it in photoshop as a 300ppi sRGB jpg and I've had a little better result. I'm using roland's ColorRip 2.2 software.

Even on the HP z6100 I've used, canvas seems to come out over-saturated. The next time I'm at my shop I think I'm going to try and give canvas a totally different media profile... say like a photo gloss stock with a medium head height and see what happens. just something to try for fun. Mike

 

[JoshLoring]

It's not going to be efficient using photoshop to print. It will kill your CPU.
Download versaworks.. I believe it's free for Roland users.
The use of rip will save you time and money. Trust me, I print photos on a regular basis and you will NOT get accurate coloring produced in an manner efficient enough to produce in a commercial speed using Photoshop to print.

 

[JoshLoring]

also, make sure you install the adobe1998.icc profile for your computers default icc. In photoshop set your default color settings to adobe1998.icc as well.
Save as tiff.. I find they work better then PDF.

 

[TripleRock]

JoshLoring... quick question... How well does Roland printers do with the Adobe RGB workspace as compared to sRGB? Are they able to hit some of those "hotter" colors? When I've worked with HP printers, it seems like they always did a little better job with standard photos in sRGB.

 

[sfr table hockey]

As far as the adobe 1998 profiles VS sRGB 1966 I have found that if the original file is in Adobe 1998 then I use the same in the rip. The files in sRGB won't have as good of a color gamutt but most cameras use this as their standard profile and you will have a bit of a color change if you use the adobe 1998 in this case.

I have a Roland FJ 42 as well as the CJ 500. Both print great canvas prints and as for color, with Roland inks and media you will get great color using their profiles. Once you change companies inks or use other company media you do need to make a custom profile for that ink and media as well as the quality of print you plan to use. Once that is done you will get great colors as well.

The Adobe 1998 is by far the best way to go if the original file was made in Adobe 1998. My thought is use whatever the file was created in for the ripping it.

To get a profile made you need to print the test pages in whatever rip you plan to use and use whatever print quality (fine, fine2, super etc.) you want to use but don't have color correction checked. This way it reads the inks saturation and color and then makes a profile to adjust all to be what it conciders to be normal. For me it working great.

 

[lovecanvas]

Thank you for your suggestions, I been beaten by lack of time, with fitting out my shop, ordering parts I have decided to look for a company in the UK to service the printer and also create monitor and printer profiles on site.

I have the tried suggestions which improved print quality vastly, being a Rip & Roland newbie I learnt so much about the printer and Rip in the process.

At this stage though I still have to make time consuming adjustments and small test prints to each image to achieve passable quality. For example, if I print a row of images, one black woman, one white women and an Asian women all hi res stock images. All seem to print ok but then the light green background on the Asian lady will come out so dark its almost black. I realise even with a calibrated system I may not get perfection but at the moment I have run out of time.

Thank you for your help, if there is a place for posting profiles let me know and I will post the Roland - fj540 profiles for these rolls www.breathingcoloruk.com/bc/catalog/index.php?cPath=303