Digital Light & Color

In my quest to achieve nice accurate prints I have bought the following:
Cibox C2202D 22" TFT 1680x1050 300cd/m2 1000:1 5ms DVI/HDCP Monitor
Epson R800
Syder2 express monitor calibrator
Lyson Pro photo satin (256gsm) paper
Lyson Photochrome R8 inks

Now whilst I do get lovely results from the printer, The colours are not quite there yet and I am wasting a lot of paper and ink try to get it right ( I mean 50+ A4 sheets )
I just want to run past the setting I am using just to make sure I am not doing something stupid.

1> my color management settings. 2.When printing I set my options thus 3. My printer settings are so: Now I know a professional would not use the Epson driver controls to adjust the colours, brightness etc on the printer and would have the colour management to ICM. But when I do that I get very dark prints and I have to use the Epson printer driver colour management controls to get near the sort of colours on the monitor. But I am still getting a slight magenta cast making the blues purplish.

Is there something I am doing wrong ? I am beginning to despair. The one area I did skimp on price was the monitor (I can hear you all slapping your palms against your heads!). It was all I could afford and I felt the Spyder 2 would correct it for me.

Am I putting the right information in the right boxes ? Do i need to get a printer profile made for me ? Is it feasable to make one own printer profile ?

Any guidance would be much appreciated.

As you mention, you should be using ICM. Problems with prints looking too dark usually stem from profiles being made with as assumption of prints being viewed in bright light - if you take you print outdoors you may find it looks a lot better. PWPs Monitor Curves (Version 5 only) was designed to help deal with the problem of how to lighten images for printing. Blue/Purple problems are common and are difficult to avoid. Some of this is due to the Abney effect (perceived hue changes with saturation) and is not accounted for my color management. Your monitor is probably not the problem.

You could definitely try having a custom profile made for you. It is not feasible to make your own unless you want to invest a lot of money in specialized equipment and software. Try Cathy's Profiles for example.

I have a similar setup to you and I get perfect monitor printer matches. I looked at my setup and have two differences. In your Color Management setting set your Monitor Profile to sRGB (the Spyder2Express has already setup your monitor correctly by loading the corrections into the display card CLUT. The other difference I have is in the Print settings: My custom profile is set to the Epson printer driver and NOT the paper profile I am using (for me it is: Stylus Photo R200 R210 Series). Then in the Printer driver setting I select the paper type I am using - yours appears to be correct except you should NOT have to make any colour or brightness changes in the driver settings, i.e. set all your colour controls to zero. I also have gamma set to 2.2 and Color Mode set to EPSON Vivid.

My thinking when using colour managment is:

1. Calibrate the monitor and make sure the CLUT is loaded correctly at boot time.
2. Don't specify a monitor profile in PWP
3. Select a generic printer profile for your printer
4. When printing, select the appropriate paper in the printer driver before printing

Hopefully this will help you get correct results.

In your Color Management setting set your Monitor Profile to sRGB (the Spyder2Express has already setup your monitor correctly by loading the corrections into the display card CLUT.

Dead wrong.
The profile contains the information for PWP to know what the monitor characteristics are after calibration.
Now if the monitor would be perfect sRGB after calibration, that might work. But is is a risky assumption (which gets even more problematic once you consider wide gamut screens or the typical recommendation to calibrate TFTs for a native white piont).

cheers
afx

One practical thing to try to counter purplish tint of printed saturated screen blues is cut down on the saturation a bit and shift blues towards cyans a little (e.g. with Colour Correct you could do both selectively for blues in one go), before converting to a printers/paper colour space. It may not look right on the monitor any longer but may help the prints.

Afx, I stand corrected! I must have been lucky to get a perfect match with my settings as they were. I guess there is always something to learn.

hi, that looks definitely as double-profiling. You said you tried ICM, but did you turn it to no colour management (the tick box)? As you're setting pwp to lyson profile, all the colour controls should be off in the printer.

best
-matti