Epson inkjet printers: Printer preset forgets settings
Filed under: Adobe Photoshop, Digital Photography, Epson Stylus Pro 3800, Mac OS X | Tags: 3800, epson, linkedin, preset, Printing, settings
Comments (1) If you use an Epson Stylus Photo/Epson Stylus Pro printer in Mac OS X and you save printer settings as printer presets (a recommended practice), there may be times when you choose a preset and realize that some of the settings mysteriously deviate from the way you saved them. For example, you might swear that you saved the Printer Color Management setting as No Color Management, but it somehow turns itself back on when you apply a preset. Other symptoms are finding the wrong paper type or color settings selected. And even more mysteriously, you might notice that sometimes it does remember the same settings that it forgot on another occasion.
I don’t know if this applies to all printers in OS X, but presets for Epson photo printers are quite sensitive to the conditions under which they were created—and unexpectedly, this can include the state of settings that are outside the Print dialog itself. Pay particular attention to the settings in the Page Setup dialog box.
For example, I once discovered that reason my Epson 3800 printer presets would not remember my color settings was that the current paper source did not match the paper source that was in effect when I created the preset! I’ve had to make two versions of my favorite presets: One preset for when I’m using the automatic paper feeder, and another for when I’m using the manual feed slot. The settings saved in each preset are exactly the same; the only difference is which paper feed is selected when I save each preset. Of course, I have to mention the paper source in each preset’s name, so that I know which one to select.
I have not yet tested if this behavior is the same in Windows.
This interaction between paper source and printer presets is yet another reason to make sure you always check the Page Setup dialog box before you print, and especially before you print a Photoshop document for the first time. In Page Setup, the selected printer, paper size, and paper source affect what you get to do in the Print dialog box. If you don’t get Page Setup right from the beginning, you’re setting yourself up for confusion when you print.
Lightroom. If you’re trying to get Epson printer driver settings to stick in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom on Mac OS X when you save a Lightroom printer preset, the trick is to not use the Epson printer driver presets. Instead, leave the printer preset set to Standard, make the printer driver settings, and then save the Lightroom printer preset.
Epson inkjet printers: Solving paper feed problems
Filed under: Digital Photography, Epson Stylus Pro 3800, Printing | Tags: 2200, 3800, epson, error, feed, linkedin, paper
Leave a Comment If paper doesn’t feed through your Epson printer, look out for the following:
Leading edge problems. If there’s anything wrong with the leading edge of the paper (the edge that goes in first), the printer may not be able to load it. Check for creases, folds, tears, or other damage. Proper loading depends on the leading edge being perfectly even, so that it goes straight into the rollers. If the leading edge is damaged, you can flip the paper around and load it the other way. If you can’t flip it around, do your best to smooth out the edge. This problem is more likely to happen with paper you’ve reused or damaged.
Paper curl. If the paper curls the wrong way (outward compared to the rollers), the printer may not be able to grab it. Remove the paper and see if it has a curl. If it’s printable on both sides you can try printing on the other side so that the curl goes the other way. If it’s coated on only one side, you’ll have to carefully try to de-curl it. If it’s expensive fine-art paper, use great care to avoid creasing it or leaving fingerprints when you try to remove the curl. The expensive solution is to use a deroller; this is typically used by people who buy paper in rolls since that tends to make the curl quite persistent.
Friction with other sheets. If you’re loading multiple sheets at a time, the frontmost sheet may not drop into the rollers if it sticks a little to the next sheet in the stack. Try jostling and fanning the paper stack to loosen them up. This is more of a problem with papers with specialized coatings and textures.
Dirty rollers. On an older printer, paper dust or house dust can accumulate on the rollers, making it harder for them to grab the paper. If a cleaning sheet is available for your printer you can try that. If you don’t have a cleaning sheet, as the print job starts try holding the paper and give it a slight nudge as it loads.
Skinny paper. On the Epson Stylus Pro 3800, the manual feed slot doesn’t like paper that’s much narrower than a US Letter sheet. You’ll have to feed it through the automatic feeder. But the automatic feeder may have trouble with paper smaller than 4 x 6 inches; you may have to keep it straight with your hands as it drops into the slot.
Black area of paper. On the Epson Stylus Pro 3800, there’s an odd issue where the Epson 3800 may not sense the paper correctly if part of the paper is already covered with black. Read about that here.
I’ve only used Epson printers, but those tips may also apply to other brands of inkjet printers.
Epson 3800 error: Incorrect paper size or Paper error
Filed under: Epson Stylus Pro 3800, Printing | Tags: 3800, epson, error, linkedin, paper, Printing, size
Leave a Comment A friend of mine was printing on an Epson Stylus Pro 3800, and as the paper tried to load the printer displayed an “Incorrect paper size” error even though the size of the photo paper matched the Paper Size selected in Page Setup. And it worked just a few minutes earlier.
My friend was trying to print multiple images on a sheet, in multiple passes. As a troubleshooting step, I turned the paper around and inserted it the other way. It worked. Why would the printer accept the paper size one way but not the other?
I came up with a theory about it. Unlike my older Epson, the 3800 can perform automatic nozzle checks and head alignments, and can sense paper sizes. I have read that it can do all this because of an optical sensor built into the printer. Now, my friend was printing images with large areas of black near the edge, and she was printing borderless. I believe that when she loaded paper that had a large black area extending about halfway across the paper, the optical sensor saw all that black and decided that the paper’s edge didn’t actually begin until the white area appeared.
I have also run into a similar problem where the Epson 3800 will simply say “Paper error” and tells you to press the paper feed button and try again. In this case I am feeding an edge that is partially printed along the leading edge, though not completely black and with a thin empty border along the edge. Even then, the 3800 senses a misfeed even though there’s nothing physically wrong with the sheet. Inserting a blank sheet loads successfully.
This behavior indicates that the optical sensor is designed to think of paper as a broad expanse of empty white, and it may incorrectly believe that long dark areas are not paper and indicate a paper feed misalignment. If you’ve previously experimented with multiple-pass printing on another Epson printer model, you may not be able to make it work on Epson printers that try to sense blank sheets optically.
Some reading on the Web indicates that certain Epson models are able to turn off this automatic page size sensing, but that feature doesn’t seem to be available on the 3800.
Cannot read CD or DVD from Windows Vista
If you get a CD or DVD from a Windows user and it seems blank, or you can’t read it on your Mac (or non-Vista version of Windows), and the Windows user swears the disc was burned successfully, the Windows user probably burned it using the default settings in Windows Vista. With the default settings, the disc may not be readable on older versions of Windows or on non-Windows systems such as Mac OS X and Linux. Bear in mind that the files may actually be there, but they may not be visible on the unsupported system.
If you are working with a Windows user who knows how to re-burn the DVD with different settings, have them re-burn it using Mastered Format instead of the default Live File System. Mastered Format is more compatible with the rest of the computing world. (So why does Microsoft make Live File System the default in Vista? Apparently it has some useful features that make DVD burning a little more flexible than it is on other systems.)
An alternative to wasting another disc is to open the disc in a copy of Windows Vista or Windows XP running in virtualization on your Mac (such as in Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion) and then drag the files over to the Mac side. That’s ultimately what I decided to do; I was able to see the invisible files in my up-to-date version of Windows XP running under Parallels Desktop.
Or, if you happen to have a PC that you can reach over the network from your Mac, you could also try putting the DVD into the PC and grabbing it over the network from the Mac.
Camera Raw: Detailed image inspection with one key
Filed under: Adobe Bridge, Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Digital Photography | Tags: Adobe Camera Raw, linkedin
Leave a Comment Camera Raw 4.1 and later add a very useful feature that appeared first in Lightroom. If you want to inspect an image closely for dust or other defects that need retouching, the Page Down key takes you through the entire image, from the top left corner to the bottom right corner. Here’s how it works:
1. In Camera Raw, zoom to 100% view or higher.
2. Press the Home key to view the top left corner of the image.
3. Press the Page Down key to move down one screen.
4. Press Page Down again to move down another screen. This is the cool part: If you hit the bottom of the image and press Page Down, Camera Raw automatically jumps to the top of the image one screen to the right! This means that all you have to do to check the entire image is keep pressing Page Down, until you reach the bottom right corner of the image.
On notebook computers without separate Home, End, Page Up, or Page Down keys, remember that they may be available as second functions on your arrow or other keys. For example, on Mac notebooks, these four functions are overlaid on the four arrow keys, and invoked when you also press the Fn (function) key. So to use Page Down, you’d press Fn+Down Arrow.
Open Raw files in Adobe Camera Raw by default
Filed under: Adobe Bridge, Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Digital Photography | Tags: Adobe Camera Raw, camera raw, file type, Photoshop
Comments (3) If you use Adobe Camera Raw as your raw converter for digital camera raw files, you might want to be able to open your raw files in Camera Raw when you double-click them. For most files, you would do this in your operating system by changing which application opens the camera raw file type.
But with Camera Raw, there’s a catch. Camera Raw is not a standalone application, so you can’t associate it directly with a file type. It turns out that this is not a big deal, because Adobe Photoshop must open camera raw files in Camera Raw anyway. So the solution is to associate camera raw files with Photoshop. I show the steps below for Mac OS X; the steps for Windows are similar.
1. On the desktop, select a raw file of the type you want to open in Photoshop. I’ve selected a CR2 file from a Canon digital SLR.
2. Choose File > Get Info (Command+I).
3. From the Open With pop-up menu in the Get Info window, choose the version of Photoshop that you want to use to open your raw files.
4. The file icon updates to indicate that Photoshop will now open it.
5. Click “Change All” so that your change applies to all files of the same type. Other file icons may not update immediately, but the change has taken effect. From now on, when you double-click that type of a raw file, it will open in Photoshop, which will then open it in Adobe Camera Raw.
Because the file association is tied to a specific file type, making this change affects only the file type you’ve changed. You’ll need to associate each different raw file type separately. For example, if you made this change for NEF (Nikon) raw files and then you later work with some CR2 (Canon) raw files, you’ll have to associate the CR2 files with Photoshop too.
(If you’re having trouble getting Camera Raw to see your raw files in the first place, try updating Camera Raw. Support for new cameras is added several times a year. Either download the latest version from adobe.com, or run the Adobe Updater utility that came with Photoshop. Note that the current version of Camera Raw may not work with older versions of Photoshop. If you are trying to edit a new camera’s raw files in a version of Photoshop that’s too old for the current version of Camera Raw, you should either upgrade Photoshop or use the free Adobe DNG converter to convert raw files to the DNG format, which older versions of Camera Raw can edit.)
Thanks to Céline C. for asking this question!
Apple keyboards are now safe for calibrated Apple LCD monitors
Filed under: Adobe Photoshop, Apple, Apple Hardware, Color management, Digital Photography |
Comments (1) If you’ve carefully calibrated your monitor and you use the white Apple keyboard that came with the iMacs and Mac Pros, you may have encountered that nasty surprise when accidentally pressing the F14 and F15 keys: They change the monitor brightness.
Changing the monitor brightness is obviously a big no-no if you’re maintaining a color-managed environment, because the monitor no longer represents the conditions under which it was profiled. Even worse, you may not notice that you’ve hit the key, or you may not know how far off you changed the brightness. All you can do is re-profile the monitor. The constant risk of accidentally hitting F14 or F15 and invalidating your monitor profile is an unusual misstep for Apple, which promotes color management as a Mac platform advantage.
There used to be no way to disable or remap the F14 and F15 keys on the Apple keyboard, but it looks like this problem will slowly fade into history. If you use the new slim aluminum Apple keyboard, you can make it so that you have to press Fn to set brightness with F1 or F1. If you have the older white Apple keyboard, you can take advantage of new keyboard shortcut editing options in Apple Keyboard Software Update 1.1 or later.
Changing keyboard brightness control with the slim aluminum Apple keyboard
The slim aluminum Apple keyboard introduced in 2007 puts the brightness keys on the function row along with the Exposé, Dashboard, and media keys. Why is this good? Because now you can bury the brightness function. To do this:
1. Open System Preferences.
2. Click Keyboard & Mouse.
3. Click the Keyboard tab.
4. Click to enable the box “Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features.”
5. Close System Preferences.
After enabling the “Use the F1-F12 keys…” option, you must press the Fn key (to the right of the Delete key) to use F1-F12 to use the alternate labels on the F1-F12 keys, such as brightness and the media keys. That means if you accidentally hit F1, you won’t throw your system out of its calibrated state.
If you still want single-key access to Dashboard and others, just redefine their shortcuts. You can do this in the System Preferences pane for each feature (such as Dashboard & Exposé), or in the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse preferences pane.
Changing or disabling keyboard brightness control with the white Apple keyboard
It turns out that Apple Keyboard Software Update 1.1 or later adds a keyboard shortcut option to disable or change keyboard brightness control for the older white Apple keyboard. To do this:
1. Open System Preferences.
2. Click Keyboard & Mouse.
3. Click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
4. Scroll all the way down to where it says Displays.
5. Disable the check box for “Display” Or, if you just want to change the shortcuts, click in the Shortcut column and press the new shortcut. For example, if you change Increase Display Brightness to Shift+F15, you prevent unintended brightness changes due to accidental key presses, but by adding Shift you can still control brightness with the keyboard when you really intend to.
6. Close System Preferences.
Note: You won’t see the Display section if you’re using the slim Aluminum keyboard, only if you are using the older white Apple keyboard.
Mac OS X: Keyboard shortcuts to launch any application
Some of the search queries that land people on this blog seem to be looking for shortcuts for applications. With Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you don’t need to create or even learn shortcuts for applications. They’re already there, but not in the form you may be expecting.
The key is Spotlight, the search utility built into OS X. Spotlight makes a decent application launcher. Just hit the Spotlight keyboard shortcut (Command+spacebar unless you changed it), type the first few letters of the application’s name, and if the application’s name is the Top Hit, press Return to launch it. (In OS X 10.4, you need to press Command+Return; In 10.5, Apple simplified it to just Return.) If it isn’t the Top Hit, use the usual Spotlight shortcuts to get to it in the list: Use the up and down arrow keys either alone, or with the Command key to jump categories.
So for example, if I want to use Activity Monitor, I press Command+spacebar, then type “act” and boom, there it is. Depending on which files and applications are on your computer, Activity Monitor may appear before you get to the third letter.
If you’re annoyed because you have to type a few letters before Spotlight narrows it down to the application you want to launch, have patience. At least in my experience, if you keep picking the same item from the search results, OS X will eventually turn it into the Top Hit, and over time you’ll need to type fewer and fewer characters to get it. (You can accelerate searching for multiple words through abbreviation; read about it here.)
By now I’ve got my Mac trained so that after pressing the Spotlight shortcut, Safari becomes the Top Hit as soon as I type “sa”, and Photoshop shows up as soon as I type “ph”. Yeah, it’s more than a single keystroke, but on the other hand, to get this feature I didn’t have to modify my system, spend an hour configuring shortcuts, or add a utility such as LaunchBar. Spotlight is already capable of launching any application on your system without any further setup.
There’s a second benefit to leaning on Spotlight for this purpose: You never have to dig down to open an application or utility that isn’t already in the Dock. You don’t even need to know where it is in your hard disk! Using Spotlight as an application launcher can also let you reduce the number of application alias icons littering your desktop or Dock.
Of course, if you really do want to manually define system shortcuts, you can open System Preferences, click Keyboard & Mouse, click Keyboard Shortcuts, and edit the list of shortcuts.
And yes, before OS X 10.4 came out with Spotlight, I used to be a devotee of LaunchBar, and I tried Quicksilver. The problem is that even if a launcher app is free, the second indexing engine drags on the system and adds complexity, another database to store and manage, and removes another set of keyboard shortcuts from the pool. When Spotlight came out, I realized that it does most of what I need, and well enough. The things Spotlight can’t do that the other utilities can do I’ve mostly covered by having Spotlight trigger AppleScripts…but that’s a subject for another entry.
Update: There are so many Web searches that come here looking for an Activity Monitor shortcut that I have to add this: If you frequently want to monitor Mac system status information, you should download iStat menus and simply have all of that CPU, RAM, disk, network, etc. information right up there in your menu bar. Ultimately, iStat menus is why I don’t need to open Activity Monitor.
Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac: Free a stuck Help window
The Microsoft Office Help window’s title bar can sometimes get stuck under the menu bar. When that happens, you can’t move the Help window, and you can’t close it because the close button is part of the title bar. Because the Help window is more like a palette than a window, it doesn’t respond to any Close Window keyboard shortcut or the arrangement commands under the Window menu, and it floats above all other windows. It basically blocks your document window until you restart the application.
Short answer
Throw out the file com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist, or if you want to be more precise, instead of throwing out that file, open it and increase the value for Help/Help_Top so that it clears the menu bar.
Long answer
Or, how I figured this out:
The usual suggestion for a problem like this is to delete an application’s Preferences file. I didn’t want to throw out the Preferences file because I’ve heavily customized my Office installation (toolbars, etc.) and I didn’t want to reconfigure everything from scratch. I suspected that there must be a setting in a preferences file somewhere that controls the position of the Help window, and if I could change that one thing I wouldn’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. And so I went looking for that setting.
First I tried AppleScript. I used the Script Editor to open the AppleScript dictionary for Excel, where I was having the problem, but I couldn’t find any commands that controlled the Help window.
I then started looking in the Preferences folder, in my Home/Library folder. You can read these files in TextEdit, but it’s nicer to use the free utility Pref Setter, which lets you view and edit the contents of a preferences file in a clean, easy, point-and-click way. I guess you could also use your favorite XML utility.
Now to find that window preference:
I looked in the file com.microsoft.excel.plist, but found nothing that looked right. While many Microsoft and Adobe applications have a preference (.plist) file at the top level of the Preferences folder, it turns out that these usually contain only information for the Open and Save dialog boxes. The real preferences files are usually buried deeper. But how was I going to find it? I typed “excel” into the Find field in Pref Setter’s Open Domain Quickly window, and it revealed a list of files inside the Preferences folder with Excel in the title.
Unfortunately, I still didn’t find what I was looking for. I thought to myself, maybe it isn’t specific to Excel…if it’s Help, maybe it’s an Office-wide preference. To test that, I typed “microsoft” into Pref Setter’s Find field and it turned up many more files, including some in a Microsoft sub-folder.
I opened com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist. It’s a long list of preferences, and I wasn’t sure I could find the one I wanted. But there’s a Find field in the com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist window, so I typed “help” into it to try and narrow down the list.
Aha! That revealed several preference settings:
Assistant\AsstWithHelp
Help\Help_Bottom
Help\Help_Left
Help\Help_LeftPaneWidth
Help\Help_Right
Help\Help_Top
Help\Help_ZoomedOut
Bingo.
Help\Help_Top was set to 22. I was pretty sure that was a vertical offset from the top of the screen, and guessed that if I set that to a much higher number, the window would move down. I changed the number to 100, saved the document, started Excel, and opened Excel Help.
Fixed!!!
I hope this serves as an example of how to locate application preference settings with the help of a utility like Pref Setter.
InDesign: Paragraph rules don’t show up
If you’re applying paragraph rules in Adobe InDesign but they aren’t visible, check the following in the Paragraph Rules dialog box (or the Paragraph Rules pane of the Paragraph Style Options dialog box if you’re editing a style):
- Make sure Rule On is enabled.
- If Weight is set to 0, increase the stroke weight.
- If Color is set to None, give it an actual color.
- Check the Width, Offset, Left Indent, and Right Indent. If any of these values is too high, it can push the rule outside the text frame where you can’t see it.
Last time this happened to me, it was because I had built a style on top of another style that had a large rule indent. I set the indent to 0 and the rule became visible inside the text frame.
