Only Half a Print - Epson blames Photoshop. Help!

[Vince_Patton@adobeforums.com]

It's so frustrating being the bouncing ball between two who want no blame.
Please, catch me and stop the banging in my head!

My Powerbook had 512mb Ram. Am using Photoshop CS. Epson Stylus 1280 would often, but not always, print only part of the photo and then spit the rest out blank. Epson blamed memory allocation.
But OS 10 does not allow changing memory.
So we tweaked it in Photshop/Preferences/Memory ... and I gave photoshop 93% of my memory and close all other programs.
I have very large photo files. Typically 98 to 115MB each. Was printing 13x19 print last night.. voila, half a print and an expensive piece of paper was wasted again.

Today I doubled my ram to 1 GB. The problem still happens.

Epson tech support blames Photoshop. (But photoshop prints on my HP Deskjet never have this problem; then again, the HP cannot print photos this big.)

Adobe wants $39 before I can even ask my question; so I turn to you kind folks for advice.

Vince

[povimage@adobeforums.com]

It's usually a spooler issue relating to contiguous disk space available for spooling the file. It could also be the result of old files left in the spooler folder.

If the laptop has only ONE hd partition, what may well be happening is that while the PS scratch file is large, you don't have enough contiguous free space left to spool the output completely. That could cause the problem you describe as well..

Keith

And don't thank Adobe or the Forum moderators - I'm not associated with either of them.

[Vince_Patton@adobeforums.com]

My hard drive does have only one HD partition.

I'm afraid I'm completely unfamiliar with spooling.

How do I check this and / or change it?

I appreciate your help!

[Todie@adobeforums.com]

If you print from Photoshop, try to resize the picture just for printing and don't save it in the end.
13x19" at 260ppi should be about 50MB.

[Vince_Patton@adobeforums.com]

I do print from Photoshop.. and my 13x19 had been at 356dpi. You're right. 260 drops it to about 48mb.

So, how do I know what the maximum file size is I should be trying to print in order to prevent this?

I'm searching for a way to know BEFORE I waste another expensive sheet of special photo paper.

[Vince_Patton@adobeforums.com]

PS:
When I search my HD for "spooler" I get only two hits.
One is an an "Extensions" folder and runs only under OS 9, the other is in Virtual PC (a Windows emulation program I have not run in months.)

[povimage@adobeforums.com]

I generally use 360 dpi.. but keep in mind the driver resizes to 720 dpi anyway for EPSON desktop printers..

Keith

And don't thank Adobe or the Forum moderators - I'm not associated with either of them.

[Vince_Patton@adobeforums.com]

Yes, the 260 is really the resolution of the original image.
I'm printing at 1440 DPI for highest quality on matte paper.

However, tell me more about clearing the spooler please.
I don't find an OS X spooler to fool with.

[Todie@adobeforums.com]

Vince, Ask the Epson people where the scratch files are.
Pov, I don't think the driver resizes the whole picture at once, just chunks of what it needs at the time (I may be wrong).

[povimage@adobeforums.com]

Photoshop sends the data to the print driver at the default resolution of the printer. For a desktop EPSON printer that is 720 dpi, for their larger format printers that is 360 dpi..

You should therefore never be upsizing to more than 720 dpi.

Keith

And don't thank Adobe or the Forum moderators - I'm not associated with either of them.

[povimage@adobeforums.com]

As for the spooler files (scratch) it doesn't much matter where they are going with only one partition.

Do this, open one of your 1440 dpi files and look at how much free space is left on your disk, and how big the Photoshop scratch file is.. I bet there isn't a lot of free space left when compared to the size of the Photoshop scratch file.

If so, the easy solution is to print from an application like QImage, that takes less scratch space or virtual memory, instead of Pshop.

Two places I KNOW you can get your question answered for free:

The EPSON Printers list (4700+ members)
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EPSON_Printers/>

or the MacEPSON List (1300+ members)
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/macepsonlist>

Keith

And don't thank Adobe or the Forum moderators - I'm not associated with either of them.

[Ann_Shelbourne@adobeforums.com]

I think that people are confusing the dpi of the printer (either 720 or 1440 dpi in the case of the Epsons) with the image resolution in ppi needed to print with maximum quality.

You shouldn't need to use image resolution of more than 270 ppi on these machines.

[povimage@adobeforums.com]

I don't know what other people are confusing, but I know I'm not... Depending on how the image is upsized to the driver, values of less than the native driver resolution CAN (but won't automatically) cause a loss of quality. Tests were run on this LONG AGO on both my EPSON list and on the predecessor Leben list. Upsizing an image beyond 720 ppi before printing showed NO increase in quality. There's no way, therefore, that I would upsize to 1440 ppi to print.

That said, very negligible (if any) additional print quality was seen in desktop printers when increasing files to 720 ppi from 360 ppi inside Photoshop. You needed some very specific conditions for it to be advantageous Decreases, however, to ppi figures less than 360 ppi did show decreased quality. On the other hand, moires could be created in synthesized testpattern images when using resolutions for the final image that were not an even integral of the driver's native resolution.

See EPSON's publication at:
<http://files.support.epson.com/pdf/pro10a/pro10aps.pdf>

Go to page 24 of the pdf, which is page 3 of document 2002.01.001A

Read "Note 2"

You can also find supporting info at:
<http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage/quality/>

Keith

And don't thank Adobe or the Forum moderators - I'm not associated with either of them.

[Vince_Patton@adobeforums.com]

Keith,
Sorry to be so dense. I thought I knew my computer better than this.
I have 15.64 Gigabytes free on my hard disk. I have 152Gigabytes free on an external hard drive.

But I do not know how to check to see how large a scratch file my image is occupying when it is open. I've searched help files and remain baffled.

I do know that my hard drive is the primary scratch file and the external is the secondary location for a scratch file, but I don't see how to observe its size at any one time.
Photshop Help says it uses the primary hard drive as a scratch file. I clearly have loads of room.
As for using Qimage, are you able to assign a custom printer profile to that?

The reason I print from Photoshop is so I can have absolute control over color management with a profile that's been custom done for my printer, my ink and my particular paper.

[John_Vitollo@adobeforums.com]

Run this shareware app - Printer Setup Repair - if in 10.3.x:

<http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/14641>

Run Print Center Repair if in 10.2 to 10.2.8:

<http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21738>

You should be in 10.3.3 as printing reliability improved a lot.

[Vince_Patton@adobeforums.com]

I have been in 10.3.3 for months now.

Problem just happened again to me on an 8x10 print, image 30MB in size. Crapped out after half a page printed. No other programs running.

Boy this is frustrating.

I'll check out your link. Thanks.

[Ramón_G_Castañeda@adobeforums.com]

Vince,

… … I have 15.64 Gigabytes free on my hard disk. I have 152Gigabytes free
on an external hard drive. … … …I do know that my hard drive is the primary
scratch file and the external is the secondary location for a scratch
file …




That is fundamentally backwards. Go to your preferences file and set your Primary scratch disk to your external hard drive and the secondary to your boot drive. It's unlikely that in that scenario your secondary disk will ever be used, given that you have plenty of available space on the external drive (which will be the primary scratch disk now).

The reason for having the scratch disk on a separate drive is so it won't slow you down by competing for the single set of read/write heads on your boot drive.

Your files ("Typically 98 to 115MB each") are not really that large. I have come close to reaching the 2GB in a couple of files.

However, if you only have 512MB of RAM, you should not be allocating 93% (!!!) to Photoshop. That's way too much. You're starving the System and the printer monitor of RAM and they're choking.

[Ramón_G_Castañeda@adobeforums.com]

Follow up:

if you only have 512MB of RAM, you should not be allocating 93% (!!!)
to Photoshop. That's way too much.




Try going down to 65% or less.

[Ramón_G_Castañeda@adobeforums.com]

Ooops! I just read you doubled the RAM to 1GB.

My advice still holds: 93% is way too much RAM to allocate to Photoshop.

Try going down to 65% or less.

(I wouldn't go anywhere near 90% unless I had 4GB of RAM.)

[John_Vitollo@adobeforums.com]

Ramon is correct...heck with 512K of Ram I wouldn't give more than 40% to Photoshop.