I saw a previous post with the same problem but with no answer published. I recently purchased the Epson R3000 and am getting absolutely horrible results with the icc profile for Slickrock after downloading the correct icc profile. I previously got perfect results while printing with my R2400 which has died. I have printed from both Photoshop CS3 and from Lightroom 3.5 and the results actually look abstract. I have the printer color management turned off and tried with the paper setting to premium glossy and printed with intent set to relative. I downloaded the Colorado Satine profile and no problems, with a beautiful rendering. I have tried various setting and always the abstract looking print. Any help would be appreciated as I just purchased 50 sheets of the Slickrock.

With my Epson 4900, I choose a resin paper in the Epson driver (Premium Gloss or Luster - the choice doesn't matter except to set the printer to use photo black ink and to set a similar weight to the Slickrock paper). I set the paper size to match the 13 x 19 stock (Super A3 / B in Epson's nonsense driver choices). The driver's color management must be disabled (Mode : Custom : Off (No Color Adjustment)). I'm running Photoshop CS5, but the settings for CS3 will be essentially the same. Choose Photoshop manages colors, use the document profile as the source (that should be the default) and set the printer profile to the Moab Slickrock ICC profile you downloaded for your printer. Use the Relative rendering intent. In my CS5 preview, the preview is an accurate thumbnail of the printed output. With Perceptual intent, the preview shows oversaturated colors and that's exactly what prints. The other two intents just show all black previews.

It's possible that the profile for your printer has a problem, or perhaps the file got corrupted during download. You should be able to use Photoshop's soft proofing capability to see what the profile will do. (View, Proof Setup, Custom for using the profile, enable color proofing)

As I mentioned in my post, the profile give me accurate colors as long as I don't follow one of the conflicting instructions I found here and stick with relative intent. Since your printer also has matte black capability, be sure the printer is set to print with photo black.

I like the look of Slickrock pearl and I've ordered a 17" roll. I plan to get a custom profile generated for my 4900 using Ernesto Santos' profiling service ( http://esartprints.com/ ). He uses a high end profiling system and I think it makes sense to use a profiling service rather than spend big bucks on one myself. A couple of printers ago I bought the ImagePrint RIP which gets you access to a vast library of high quality paper profiles and which gives you much more control over output than using the Epson drivers. However, the software is expensive and not very user-friendly despite the praise it gets from devoted users.

I hope you get this working without wasting a lot of paper and ink. Let us know if you find a workflow that works.

Thank you BJ Nicholls for your response. I do set Photoshop to manage colors, use photo black ink, and turn off ICM in the printer settings, and I feel I know what I am doing as I got gorgeous photos before with my R2400. The photos are coming out almost posterized and it looks like that in the preview. I just think at this time the ICC profile is corrupt and I will download again. I even tried to print with the R2400 slickrock profile and almost got a decent print, was a little washed out. Using Windows 7 and I will post if I get different results. Thank you again.

Chris