Transfer problems part 1... photoshop/epson c88

[herrnusser]

Hello all! I'm would imagine that most of you have tried the "transfer magic" solution and system. It worked great for me for a while. However as of late I am expirienceing some problems. I'll try to give a step by step in hoping that some one will recognize the problem.

1. draw and scan the image
2. open in MS paint to clean, modify etc.
3. sometimes, not always, use photoshop for the same
4. attempt to print on an epson c.88, as per the settings of "tranfer magic"
, including the "black ink only setting"
5. print, only to see faint horizontal lines that patern around the scroll
6. scream and curse at inanimate objects
7. play with the settings...trying to correct them, reprint
6. see step #6

I'm hoping to correct this problem, as it is a tremensous source of aggrevation. (not metntion a lot of epson acetates!)
On a related note everytime i try to get clear black and white images, it saves as a murky gray with loss of detail and shape. Perhaps someone has some suggestions or can offer assistance! Thanks.
Ed


P.S. Tira, love the pipe wrench! Most of my early engravings were for "tools of the trade"

 

[Mike Cirelli]

Maybe you need new ink or try converting you picture to grayscale and print.

 

[coincutter]

1. draw and scan the image
sanning to what resolution?

2. open in MS paint to clean, modify etc.
Bad program to bother with. Not every program saves the image back in the resolution it was captured in.
or prints it out in the resolution it was captured or saved in.
Consider that anything MS gives away free is junk.

3. sometimes, not always, use photoshop for the same
have you noticed images print better in PS
be sure when you print image you go through the steps to insure the resolution is balanced to the image.
Another wayto check this is to shrink your image on screen to the size you wish it printed.
Then zoom in to see if it turns to muck. If it's mush you have something setwrong. It should be as sharp visually at zoom as it was before you sized it.


4. attempt to print on an epson c.88, as per the settings of "tranfer magic"
, including the "black ink only setting"

5. print, only to see faint horizontal lines that patern around the scroll
you could have a crap printer, a hosed driver or some faint color not visable to your eye that is in the background if it was a web image.

when scanning set for high rez image 600-1200 dpi
make sure your printer rezolution is set to same within software
convert your image to grey scale and push contrast as high as you can retaining the image
in PS adjust the threshold.

print on paper till you get it right

take transfers you have screwed up and wipe of ink with a sponge dry and reuse. Never throw them away
unfortunately epson inks have a tendancy to lock up after a while so they dont come off easily after a week or so. But they will if you get them early on.

HP's graphic printers using the 45 cart do not seem to have this problem.


trim your transfer sheets to envelope size or smaller for testing
you can also run a paper print back through with a small clip ofacetate taped to it
just be sure to do it neatly so the tape doesnt come off in the printers or you will really be cussing

other option uninstall printer to remove driver and reinstall.
anyime you are running windoz reality is subject to change as files are over written and get hosed

 

[AllanFink1960]

Hurrnusser
Remember the words of Hercule Peroit..."order and method"...

Determine if the problem is your printer hardware or printer software.

1) First, probably 80% of printer problems can be solved by turning off the printer, and turning off your computer, (long enough for the disk drives to stop spinning--3min or so) and then restart everything. This is especially true of laser printers.

If that doesnt help, a large percentage of the other printing problems are from corrupted print drivers, so..

2) Delete your printer driver, and reinstall it. Then reboot everything again. It only takes a few minutes. If you dont know how, you may have to look it up, since its different depending on what brand of computer and operating system you have.

3a) See if your hardware is busted: Print your printer's test page. Most printers (even cheep ones) have a drawing built into them that the printer will print out on one sheet of paper with the touch of a button (ok, maybe several buttons). It will generally have fine print, fine lines, gray patterns, colors etc. It will tell you a LOT about how healthy your printer is. It will often list a lot of technical info about the printer, fonts, memory, etc.

3b) See if your hardware is busted: In your drawing program, draw a large rectangle about 8x10 inches and fill it with a light gray solid fill, maybe 10 or 20 percent. Print this and see if it comes out even. It might be that your printer is streaking, or has a dead spot. The easy win in this case is when you just have a bad ink cartridge which can be replaced. The bad day comes when it streaks and splotches with new ink. The theory with this step is, if your printer cant get a dumb big rectangle to print, dont expect it to get all those fine delicate shaded drawings right.

3b) Again, in the drawing program that is giving you trouble, draw a page of 20 rectangles, say 2 inches square. Arrange them to pretty much fill up the page, so you can see if your printer is just printing a streak or has a dead spot. Set the fill for each to gray, ranging from 0 to 100 percent, in five percent increments, and print that. See if the rectangles print without damage. Some problems may show up at some ranges of gray more than others. If you have a finniky printer, save this file somewhere and print it once in a while, especially if your printer has been ON for a long period of time without actually printing anything.

Side note: some rubber printer rollers deform over time, if kept warm and still...thats why many laser printers "wake up and roll em" every few minutes, to keep things round. If your rollers have "melted" you may find a long ribbon of damage that repeats every few inches, across the paper at 90 degress to the direction it goes thru the printer. This is USUALLY across the short side of the paper, unless you have one of those big office printers that feed the paper long edge first, in which case the roller marks will be across the long axis.

4) File format and bit depth. For most of the stuff you want to be scanning and using with transfers, you want black and white line art. You can save this bit level in nearly every graphic file format, but essentially you dont need color, or grays. Without getting into a lot of computer science about how colors are done on computers, you want the file to just save white pixels and black ones, not colored ones or gray ones. So if on your scanner you can find some setting for "line art" or "1-bit" color, or "black and white" then scan with that. 300 dpi (dots per inch) is considered standard for printing. You will also be very happy with the smaller file sizes. You also want to save in a "lossless" file format, like tiff, since some lossy formats will throw pixels away and rough up your drawing. You probably wont be putting your scans on the internet, so you would do better with a 1-bit tif than jpg, gif, or png which are mostly used for webpages and are (for lack of a better term at this moment) less precise. There are other formats that are possible, but most scanners, and cameras and software these days will work with tiff.

What happens is that when a printing device gets a command to print something in "gray", it has to represent that with some kind of dot pattern of solid black ink. Every company has their own way of getting from a smooth gray to a dot pattern and some are WAY better at it than others. Some use halftone dots, some use dithering, and some have their own way of doing it. Hence matching a gray from one device to another is sometimes kind of messy. If you use a 1-bit image, the computer inside the printer doesnt have to do as much to make the gray pattern. Its more complicated than that but I am getting tired of typing.

A bit of history: Dover Publications first started saving all their old engravings as computer clip art with one bit images. The files are tiny and very clear.

Try that much and see what you come up with. Good luck.

Allan "born to bitmap" Fink

 

[monk]

transfer problem

perhaps the unwanted streaks could simply be a dirty printhead or inkjet nozzles. try running a clean printhead or nozzle routine. that may fix the streaking -- maybe.

 

[Tom White]

Transfers

Hi,

In order for me to help I need a couple of answers.
Have you changed the ink tank recently and did you use a genuine epson or a generic. This is important as a generic with my settings may bleed to the edges. Not all inks are the same.
What file format are your pictures in? Some formats do not resize well.
If you zoom or increase the size of the image on screen do the lines show.
In the printer settings do you have all of my settings in, or just the black ink only?
Another option is some fuzz or built up material is riding back and forth on the print head of the printer.

You can send me email directly to transfersolutions@commspeed.net

We can resolve this I am sure.

Tom White

 

[herrnusser]

Thanks guys... I will follow these pearls of wisdom. What did we do before this forum? see step # 6