08.31
More than once I’ve praised HP for making proper open source drivers available for almost all of their printers. However, HP’s hplip is rather limited. It’s not really configurable, and that’s okay for most people, and it was okay for me up until now.
If you’re considering a color managed workflow these limitations can get rather ennoying. Profiling a printer involves turning a printers color correction off, and printing a sheet with about 400 differently colored spots on it. Then a device called a colorimeter measures those spots, and calculates a correction profile. However whenever a printer(-driver) auto corrects your colors dynamically it immediate invalidates this exacting correction profile.
Now enter project Gutenprint, it’s a collection of open source printer drivers, supporting a huge set of printers from different brands. The cool thing about Gutenprint is that they provide two PPDs for each printer, a plain one, and a simplified one. The simplified PPD is similar to the PPD hplip provides for their printers, it offers basic options to tune your printing. The normal Gutenprint PPD however provides the user with a tremendous amount of knobs and dials. For example it’s possible to enable 16bit support or choose your own dithering algorithm and most important, you can choose your own color correction model, including an “Uncorrected” setting, which is paramount for profiling.
Is anybody using Gutenprint (simplified or not) for photo printing? Specifically with Epson printers? Did full bleed print work for you? What are your experiences? I’d like to hear about them…
