Still going on this one. Followed all the advice and this is the result: Forget the general colour balance of the image, which to get perfect I will need a tailor made profile, and for the purposes of this discussion are a bit of a red herring.
With source space as Adobe 1998 RGB, whites in a test image on screen are at 255RGB. Printing to generic Pixl or Lyson ICC profiles results in whites with a faint tone of ink. Converting to any of these profiles in MODE>CONVERT TO PROFILE shows that the whites have been changed to 254RGB, i.e. 1%C. This means that what are supposed to be transparent areas of image (e.g. areas with text but no picture, borders around the image etc) are printed with 1%C on them. Using the Epson supplied profiles, this is not the case and whites remain white, and when converted are still at 255RGB. Remember... forget what the rest of the image looks like for the moment. Consider this.. I create a new A4 sized document in photoshop, and put nothing in it. It is blank... transparent (shown by grey squares). I print it... the printer chugs away filling a whole page of A4 with 1% Cyan. There is nothing wrong with the printer because the Epson profiles print white without leaking cyan ink (it pauses as the driver calculates what to do for the whole image, and when the driver has finished, it spits out the paper without the head even having got out of bed... hey presto a blank page). I know that for aesthetic reasons whites in images are not generally printed at 255RGB as they look like holes in the page, but this is a decision I can make for each individual photoshop image layer in LEVELS, leaving the background... devoid of colour. I have not had a good enough answer so far as to why ANY profile is laying down ink when the source image values are 255RGB. The paper stock etc are irrelevant (they will change saturation, colour balance etc as reflectivity, absorbancy, dot gain etc vary... but we are not talking about the colour balance here). Where there is a total absence of colour in the image, no colour should be laid down on the paper. All I want is to be able to print nothing. Help. Giles =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
