Adobe blamed Epson drivers for not anticipating CS3’s changes. Like they’re clairvoyant or something. Their reason was that it was too hard to take into account every printer on the market when writing the new (unasked for) CS3 printing module. A feeble excuse when it comes to Epson pro machinery, though – it is the industry standard, after all.
Solution? – use CS2 for printing, authored back when Adobe wrote its software to be compatible with existing equipment and drivers, not expecting the world to fall into line with whatever it decided it would do. CS2 works flawlessly with my 7800, CS3 remains a basket case for the same reasons you mention, though checking/unchecking the fine detail box makes no difference. CS3 is erratic – sometimes it works as directed, but then out of nowhere it will suddenly decide to attenuate a pano print.
We’ll see if they get it right with CS4’s "improved" printing, but don’t hold your breath.
I have narrowed it down to the "Finest Detail" check box under the custom, advanced tab. Checking this "Finest Detail" check box reproduces the problem.
If you are printing "photos" you realize you do _NOT_ want to check this box, right? The Finest Detail is ONY intended to be used when printing out vector graphics, not raster graphics. So, for photos, this should not be used. Pretty sure this is in the printer manual…
I do understand the concept of "Finest Detail" primarily for the smoothing of vector based graphics including text. When I print my fine art reproductions I include credit and copyright information at the bottom of the print. This setting helps with that since it is usually small print. I also include the title of the painting in larger text. I will have to run some tests to see if there is a visible drawback to not using this setting with the text. If so I will just print with CS2 but for what I paid for the upgrade I should not have to.
It seems CS3 is going the way of Windows Millenium with its shelf life and bugs.
and actually the concept of "Finest Detail" was left out of the manual.
I had a similar problem and determined that it was caused by allocating too much of my computer’s RAM to Photoshop and not having enough RAM for the printer. Reduced that allocation and everything printed fine.
Hope this helps
Well now I’m still having centering issues. This needs to be fixed. Adobe please return the code back to what it was in CS2 and please don’t tell me its fixed in CS4 unless you plan to give me a free upgrade because I’ve had CS3 for about a month. Have you given up on CS3?
tried all the fixes and workflow issues.
If you rely on CS3 to center your prints, they will be centered within the printer’s printable area, which may not be what you want, especially if the printable area has a larger margin on one end of the paper. With Epson printers, "minimize margins" gets rid of this uneven amrgin situation and allows centering to work.
It was already set to minimize margins as I read in another thread. I tried another method which was to set a custom size and save that size as a "custom" rather than just setting and printing as "user defined". I tested this several times and each time it gave incorrect positioning when not saving the custom size.
I can only speculate it is a comunication issue between the driver not buffering and communicting the "user defined" size. Maybe photoshop needs a physical saved file for correct positioning.
I also believe it is a communication issue between the Adobe team and the Epson team. Unfortunately I have no workaround for that.
Thanks for the tip. I reported the problem. However I was passing on a USER tip as far as a workaround to the problem since I have not gotten any response from abobe or any help from from their FAQ and this forum is under support/user to user. I thought it would be helpful to other users on how I got it to work. Hope it helped somebody.
