TurboPrint & PrintFab

Hi. There is a problem with white text printed on black background (RGB 0,0,0). I attached a scanned print where the problem is visible. Text, printed with PrintFab on black background has some weird stripes on the same lines that the text resides. For some reason those lines are printed darker than the whole background and they become quite visible to the eye.

My printing setup:

Printing application: Photoshop CS v8
Printer: Epson Stylus Photo P50
Printer driver: PrintFab 0.88beta
Working space: RGB Adobe 1998 (set both in PS and PF)
PrintFab color mode: Color RGB
Print quality: 5 - 5760dpi, all other settings default (ink limit set to 100)
Paper type: Matte inkjet paper

The only way that printed correctly without any darker lines was switching from RGB to CMYK in Photoshop and setting CMYK proof in PrintFab. Then it printed normally without any lines, background was the same color everywhere.

Looks like there is a problem with RGB color mode. Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

Hello,

thank you for your feedback!

In areas with solid color a different (quicker) halftoning algorithm is used by PrintFab - this should normally not be visible in the printout but obviously is visible in your case.

We will try to reproduce the problem. Just one question: which version of PrintFab do you use (as visible in PrintFab Toolbox, dialog "About PrintFab Toolbox")?

I just discussed the problem with my colleague and he also spotted (slight) differences in the background color in your Epson driver scans. Maybe there is already a problem in the image or in the data that Photoshop sends to the driver.

Can you please send the Photoshop file for our tests - e.g. by email to
mail at zedonet dot com

Now that you've mentioned it, I can also see it on Epson driver's scan! Very strange. I took a look on the printed sheet and cannot see anything, although the scan shows color difference. But color differences can be clearly seen on the sheet printed from PrintFab. I've sent you the PSD file, but it's just a black background (0,0,0) with white Arial text on it. Nothing more. I should remind you that this happens only when printing in RGB color space (Adobe 1998). When I switched to CMYK, those color differences went away. And my PrintFab version is 0.88beta (I wrote it in the original post).

Is there any update on the subject? Did you manage to reproduce the problem? If not then I could try looking into other things besides PrintFab that could have caused this. This little problem is the only thing keeping me away from moving all my workflow through PrintFab.

I had difficulties to reproduce the printed output that you got. To determine the current print parameters, please send the PrintFab log file by opening

Start -> All programs -> PrintFab -> Show log files

and enclose the file "printfab.log". If the file is too large, you can send it in a ZIP archive (e.g. compress from Windows Explorer using the right-mouse-button option "Send to ZIP archive").

Important: please send the log file directly after a printing the page that is visible in your forum entry.

printfab.log is empty (0kb and no info inside). Only zedomon.log and controlcenter.log contain information. Maybe logging is turned off? Where can I enable it?