VueScan 7.6.81 Printer Profiling Help, Please

[Mike G.]

Greetings All,

I seem to be missing something here, and hope someone can set me
straight. I have Vuescan 7.6.81, a Canon S900 printer, an Epson
Perfection 1650 Flatbed and a Minolta SE5400 film scanner. I'm trying
to use Vuescan to generate printer profiles for various papers. Before
the 'make it8 target' stage, I set the printer driver characteristics I
want (from Vuescan, File - Print Setup) and save the setup (Apply - OK,
in the driver, and File - Save Options, in Vuescan). Generally I'm
setting everything totally neutral and non-auto, but I'm selecting the
paper type. However, it is back to the default settings (plain paper)
the next time I open it, even if I do it immediately. While I realize
the printer should be at a 'neutral' state to print out the it8 target,
I would think some of the settings, such as paper type, which I assume
controls halftoning and probably the amount of ink being laid down,
would be relevant. However, everything gets done as 'plain paper', no
matter what I try to set.

As soon as I hit scan, the resulting file just blows right out to the
printer. There is no pause at the driver for adjustments. I tried to
set the driver to 'Print with Preview', hoping it would give me a pause,
but again (presumeable) Vuescan reset the driver to default settings and
it just prints in plain paper mode.

Note that the driver retains settings when printing from all other
software, so I'm not seeing this as a driver problem. Something has to
be resetting it to default state, and since I'm printing from within
Vuescan, well, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck....

Anyway, what is it I'm not getting here? Any help or suggestions would
be really appreciated. I just seem to unable to grasp the essence of
this one, and need some straightening out.

TIA,
Mike

 

[Markus Plail]

Generally I'm setting everything totally neutral and non-auto, but I'm
selecting the paper type. However, it is back to the default settings
(plain paper) the next time I open it, even if I do it immediately.

You have to set the (Windows) default to the settings you want to print
at. Vuescan seems not to be able to save printer driver settings.

regards
Markus

 

[Mike G.]

Hello Markus,

Thanks for taking the time to jot me the answer, Indeed, that did the
trick. In the bigger picture, however, after spending 2 days and
burning a fair amount of paper, I have decided that my workflow is just
not destined to use Vuescan printer profiles. No matter what I tried, I
kept getting a red cast and extreme oversaturation, worse on plain paper
and matte photo paper than on glossy. Perhaps this is an artifact of
the limitations of trying to use a scanner as a colorimeter. Or maybe is
is simply operator error.

Not all is lost, however. I found that Red River Paper has recently
posted profiles for Canon photo printers and their papers. I further
found that their Premium Matte profile works very well with Canon Matte
Photo Paper, while their UltraPro Gloss profile works better than
anything else I've found with Canon Photo Paper Pro, if I manually apply
a -6M correction in my printer driver.

I applaud their posting high quality profiles, as they are very hard to
come by for Canon printers, and am in the process of ordering some of
their very fine papers to show support for their efforts.

Again, thanks, Markus, for getting me past my stumbling point.

Mike