Why is my printer giving me a faint, blue background.

[loonsailor]

My 3880 is doing something that I'd never seen it do in the past.  I'm printing images from Lightroom 3.4.  When the image prints, it has a faint blue background that goes from the image to the specified margin, in whichever is the shorter dimension requiring extra white space.  So for a long, skinny image, there's a faint blue background from the top and bottom to the margin, while the margin is white all around.

I set the borders for .38" on all four sides, and check "rotate to fit" and "repeat one photo per page", uncheck "zoom to fill".  I've selected "single image / contact sheet".  The page grid is set for 1x1.  All of the stuff in the "page" - background color, ... - is unchecked.  It's got the correct profile selected, and the driver is set to AccuPhoto2, Premium Phot Glossy paper (it's Canson Baryta), no color mgmt., 1440 dpi, high speed.  I've tried increasing platen gap to "wide", paper thickness to 4, but that has no effect.

The Cell Size sliders are also behaving oddly.  When I reduce the left and right margins, only the width slider changes.  When I reduce the top / bottom margins, only the height changes.  Even though the entire image is reduced and shows the correct aspect ratio on the screen, the sliders don't reflect the correct aspect ratio.  When I reduce the cell size in the appropriate dimension manually, the blue background box gets smaller or goes away.

Any ideas?  Thanks for any help with this!

[Schewe]

What kind if printer profiles? Did you make them using the ICC version 4 profile? If you do a forum search you'll see that certain V4 profiles cause a tinted background when printing through Mac OS X 10.6.x. BTE the fact you don't mention your OS is a pretty big omission. If you want help it's useful to give ALL relevant tech info.

[loonsailor]

MacOS 10.6.7.  It's a profile that I made with my ColorMunki.  I had thought that it was a V2, but ColorSync tells me that it is a V4 profile.  Is there a way to convert it to a V2 profile, or do I need to make a new one?  Or, I guess I could use the canned profile.

Thanks, Jeff!

[neil snape]

Maybe you could change your prefs first to V2 profiles, then optimise the profile in question. This should revert it to  a V2 profile , thus you'll eliminate this blue defective background zone printing.

[Alan Goldhammer]

MacOS 10.6.7.  It's a profile that I made with my ColorMunki.  I had thought that it was a V2, but ColorSync tells me that it is a V4 profile.  Is there a way to convert it to a V2 profile, or do I need to make a new one?  Or, I guess I could use the canned profile.

Thanks, Jeff!

I think you need to create a new profile by directing CM to output a version 2 profile as the V4 has extra stuff in it.  I'm on a Win7 machine and V4 profiles do not present a conflict (another way Apple confuses things unfortunately).

[loonsailor]

Maybe you could change your prefs first to V2 profiles, then optimise the profile in question. This should revert it to  a V2 profile , thus you'll eliminate this blue defective background zone printing.

I tried this, but only succeeded in crashing the ColorMunki software.

Rather than build a new V2 profile, I tried an old Canson-supplied profile, and it works fine.  When I checked the Canson web site, the profile they now supply is V4, but luckily I had an old one on my disc, even though I wasn't using it.

Not sure why I was seeing this for the first time now.  Maybe I hadn't done any printing since the 10.6.7 upgrade, but I definitely did under 10.6.6, and I hadn't seen it then.  Ah, well.

Thanks much for the help, Jeff, Neil & Alan.

[howardm]

not surprising you can't optimize a v4 down to a v2.

[digitaldog]

not surprising you can't optimize a v4 down to a v2.

Exactly, the profile has to be regenerated. As of this time, V4 profiles are not useful, just the opposite.