more on printing on blumenthal silk

this morning i ironed the sample from last night and pulled off the backing. it looks lighter, and seems to have left behind some yellow, but i don’t miss it.

so i might only want to reduce the ink desity only 25% – depending on the purpose of the piece.

i found it sticks to the glass nicely when i use a mix of Golden’s soft gel gloss and GAC 200. I’m testing to see if it looks a little more translucent if i wet it first so it absorbs more water from the gel. But it’s tones better than the lazertran for looking glowy in the light.

I did loose some detail. Should i do extra sharpening? hum…

i also ordered sample packs of the Colortextile cotton and silk. I went ahead and ordered some ink from them as well cuz they have a baseline shipping cost per order. I don’t have the cash flow to order a whole $100 worth of stuff to get free shipping. Sheesh! at amazon it’s only 20!!

and i am interested in the organza but i have to wait til next month..

color correcting blumenthal silk

well I spent a whole lot of time messing with the curves in Photoshop, trying to get the color right on the blumenthal silk. I have gone full circle and i’m really scratching my head on this. basically one way to fix a picture is to take a curve on an adjustment layer (if you have elements use selective color i suppose -but the curve is so neat to look at!) and make the screen look like the print out and then make a new adjustment layer curve with the opposite info! but the bottom line is that something that seemed to have stopped working (switch input/output numbers) is working again.

an interesting thing is that curves is represented as a line indicating from 0 (darkest) to 255 (white) on a pure diagonal. if you pull the line up from the mid point, you make the middle pixels lighter and if you pull them down they get darker.

So you’d think the “opposite” of one curve would look like it’s mirror. but some how it doesn’t. instead it seems that it’s upside down and backward! so i’m shaking my head and got my son in to help me think it through.

Anyway. the main adjustments i’m making are tonal just the blacks and whites and grays. i’m learning that the color adjustment can be much less if you fix the tonality first. this is easier for me to do now that i work with this nifty test strip (little squares of white to black in 21 gradations) with a color gradient rainbow thing. I add a swath from the picture i want to print.

i can say for sure that i have to reduce the ink 33% –that really helps (BTW since writing this i have found that silk that i cut and put in a plastic bag and got back to a couple of weeks later did not need the ink reduction.)

well the fix just came out of the printer. it looks ok but i have to wait to see it in the daylight (or should i say fog light!) to be sure. the light in this room is bad. I can see that, from reducing the ink, the dark colors look better and the light colors got too light.

to do the fix in levels slide the mid point slider to the left to lighten the midtones and then on the output at the bottom move the darks slider to the right to lighten the blacks. you could do it in selective color too where you’d lighten the blacks and grays.

instability

the blumethal silk is acting completely different!
oh boy! i don’t know what’s up but my new roll of blumenthal is acting completely differently from (than?) the stuff i had before. I guess the main difference is that i didn’t worry about how much ink was going down before, set it up like it was paper. but my new roll is clearly unhappy with how much ink is going down! ink everywhere, what a mess!

I’m wondering if the product has this much variation or if the silk I had gotten from my friend was really old or something.

the good news is that except for the extra ink, which i know how to solve, the color is looking good with little adjustment.

in other words it seems to have the right colors but just too much of it all.

i have to wait for it to dry enough to cut it off the roll so i can print the next thing.

as usual i ran into some strange restrictions with the Epson R2400. I’d been using the borderless manual roll setting and feeding cut silk through the roll slot even though it wasn’t on a roll.

when i got my new roll i decided to set it up like a real roll. BUT Epson’s roll paper sizes don’t include 8.5!

Seriously.

i put the roll handling things on the ends of the roll. these things let the roll spin and attach to the back of the printer. they attach fine to the roll but they won’t then attach to the printer because the tabs on them don’t line up with the slots on the back of the printer.

the roll won’t fit on the printer unless it’s 8.3 inches! every roll out there is .2 of an inch too big!!!

what are they thinking?

so, being too lazy to start cutting sheets, i tried what i thought was a shortcut. whenever i’m lazy and try a shortcut, i almost always end up doing twice as much work.

this was one of those times.

i left the roll in the roll handing things and put that on a shoe box so the roll sat above and behind the roll feeder. i put the cut edge in the roll slot, just like i’d done with the cut sheet. The idea was that the silk would feed into the back roll slot but with out attaching the roll to the printer.

the Epson took the paper and had trouble lining it up, which it does sometimes. but i couldn’t get it to reset properly, pushed the wrong button and instead of it backing up to try again, it starts pulling out _all_ the silk off the roll! O NO!!

a real I Love Lucy moment if you know what i mean.

it gets to the end of the roll and the printer starts spinning like crazy because the silk is firmly taped to the end of the roll and won’t come through! The printer is not going to stop til all the silk is thru. i jumped up, reached over and yanked the silk off the roll while quickly ripping the tape off the end of the silk so it wouldn’t go into the printer and gunk it up!

So there was all my silk laying curled up on my printer table.

I rolled it back up, put it back on the shoe box, and fed it in the Epson again. yes i _am_ a glutton for punishment.

But before going any further i decided to read the rest of the directions. The directions provided by Epson show being able to choose a banner setting after setting the print perimeters. there is one option option for banner and one for separate pictures with spaces. this tells the printer when to stop. It allows you to to print your prints print right next to each other with no spaces in between.

but i didn’t see this option. so i messed around and determined that this option only becomes available when you choose “banner” in page set up first. (so you can choose banner there and change your mind in the next dialogue?) a regular choice of manual roll paper doesn’t give you the banner choice.

Ok fine. i chose the banner setting and you won’t believe this, i lost the velvet fine art setting! all the others with the good paper profiles have become grayed out as well. what the ___! ?!

How on earth can the printer’s ability to stop at a certain point and not advance the paper have anything to do with the paper profile used?

So with a big sigh i fed the paper in there anyway, and this time it set up fine.

it actually fed pretty nicely, until the end when it started spewing all the silk out again! OMG! so reached over and pushed the right button this time and it stopped, and started backing up! oh no! i’m imagining that it’s going to back right up into the printer and gunk everything up cuz there’s all that extra ink sitting on top of the silk!

amazingly it stopped at what looks like a nice pace to start the next picture if i’d actually sent a full 11 inches to the printer. but the epson believes it’s jammed. and i don’t want to press anymore of those buttons till i get the over saturated silk off the end.

well i think writing this gave it time to dry. back to work.

yeah it is kinda fun, although right at the moment that i think i’m about to trash my printer.

i’m not laughing!

blumethal silk

I’ve been testing the blumenthal silk on my Epson 2400 all morning. the only paper profile that comes close to looking good on the silk is the “velvet fine art” setting. I’m on a roll getting the color as i want it and conquering the ins and outs of the back manual feed thing. (i couldn’t get to “velvet fine art” without it. )

I just hit the wall tho — the last print was off and i’m too tired to figure out where to go next.

I wanted to mention that i think it’s really interesting that when i print out the tests the colors shift but not the blacks and whites and grays. I use a color test strip that has a section of blocks of B&W from white to black 22 steps, and a ranbow of color, plus little pieces of chalenging art of mine.

when i print it out no color is introduced into the B&W blocks. so if i try to fix a color shift globally i begin to introduce a color shift into the grays! so i think that leaves fixing it with selective color only.

black and white

really grayscale. i think maybe my latest beach photo, a lensbaby interpretation of a broken shell, is better as a grayscale cuz when i converted it, out popped this face!
so the color was a distraction from the form. it was the color of the grains of sand.
but to add interest i reduced the opacity of the layer that i used for the channel mixer and let a little color thru. this actually made it eery – like a skeleton!