If you go to many crafting sites that discuss how to set up an Epson printer for sublimation, you’ll see that there are suggested color correction settings. For best colors, they say, it’s imperative to set the Custom color correction settings of Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, and Density. If there’s a discussion group involved, people are also complaining about colors not matching what they expected, some disappointingly so, like orangey-red skin tones, dusky colors looking too bright, or tones that are shifted. Unexpected and unwanted color shifts are to be expected when you change the brightness, contrast, or saturation color settings.

Unexpected and unwanted color shifts are to be expected when you change the brightness, contrast, or saturation color settings.

– Inspired Squirrel

Brightness, contrast, and saturation are some of the most common tools for working with color on a computer. They are designed to change the colors in very specific manners. I’d like to show what these functions do so people can understand how they are asking their printer to change the colors with these settings.

This will look best displayed on a larger screen so you can view several graphic examples side-by-side.

Shown below is the dialog that shows the custom color correction settings.

You’ll see that Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, and Density are all set to zero by default. There’s a slider that goes from -25 to 25. You can move the slider and the number in the box next to the slider will change, or you can type in the number and the blue slider indicator will adjust accordingly.

Density

Let’s start with an easy setting: Density. Density does not change any colors; it changes the amount of ink put down. A negative value will put less ink down, a positive value will put more ink down. The more ink that is put down means it takes longer to dry. If it takes too long to dry, especially with large areas of contiguous ink coverage, the paper can ripple a bit and cause problems. One is that the rippled paper hits the printhead as it goes back and forth to print causing black smudges, sometimes with white scratches in it. Another is that the paper guide wheels drag through the ink and smear it; some have star wheels and cause dotted pin pricks (you can actually feel the pricks in the paper when it dries). Lastly, if the printhead is pumping out a lot of ink over a long period of time, the pump may be working at the edge of its designed capacity and start faltering a bit and cause little spurts of ink. In any case, moving the Density setting to zero is usually a great start in fixing these problems. (Also moving up one paper in the Paper Type list helps a lot as the papers are listed roughly in order of how much ink they put down.)

So what do these color settings do?

Brightness changes how light (or dark) the color is. A positive value removes the black shades from the color, eventually moving it towards white. A negative value adds black shades to the color, darkening it towards black.

Contrast is a function that looks at the difference between the lightest and darkest parts of your image. A positive value will accentuate that difference and make the dark parts darker and the light parts lighter. A negative value closes the gap between the dark and light parts.

Saturation is a function that looks at the pureness of the color. A positive value moves the color away from gray towards its most pure color (so a maroon will move towards red) while a negative value will add pure gray to the color.

In pretty much any graphics manipulation program, these same settings exist as functions, usually with positive and negative slider bars. The scale can be different; for example, GIMP allows changing the contrast and brightness between -127 and 127, while the saturation is changed as a scale from 0 to 10 where 1 is no change (so it’s either a fraction or a multiplier).

In order to show how the printer changes the colors, took 3 images through a series of changes to brightness, contrast, and saturation to show what we’re asking the printer to do. First I did an image with really vivid colors. Then I used an image with more subtle color shading that is supposed to be colorful but not eye-poppingly vibrant. Then I used a photo. Looking at how the colors change with each setting, both separately and applying several at a time can simulate how the printer changes the colors. It also illustrates some of the most common color complaints.

The Vivid Image

I created an image of a series of colored, overlapping, somewhat translucent hexagons in a color wheel arrangement. Note that where the hexagons overlap, the colors mix to form other colors that are mixes of adjacent colors. Pay attention to that detail! The colors I used are intentionally vivid and bright and do not match anything in the real world, meaning that the red doesn’t match a Coke can and the blues aren’t representative of sports teams where if it’s a little “off,” it’s very noticeable. If that yellow were to print a just a tiny bit more orange or just a tinge more green, it would still give the same impression and the colors would look great when pressed on a blank. It is a PNG with a white background (by design).

Brightness

This is the function affects how light or dark the image is. I did this in GIMP. The GIMP scale goes from -127 to +127, so I chose the numbers -64 (about halfway to darkest setting), +32 (about a quarter of the way to the lightest setting), and +64 (about halfway to the maximum lightest value). This gives us a good range to illustrate what happens as brightness changes. See the images, below.

-64	Original	+32	+64

Sublimation settings on the printer are all positive, meaning the colors get lighter. But what happens when it goes darker? The first picture shows a negative brightness — the colors go to gray, as does the background. This is important: all pixels in the image are affected by the brightness options which includes any background. Notice how the colors are a bit more dusky on the -64 option when compared to the original. Showing what happens when the brightness is turned down helps to understand what’s taken out when brightness is turned up. The other settings at +32 and +64 get a bit lighter. They almost look a bit more transparent and maybe a little less vivid? In this case, yes, but imagine starting with something a little less vibrant, like the gray -64 image, then brighten it to the Original setting.

Contrast

Contrast looks at the difference between the lights and the darks. Similarly to brightness, this is on the -127 to 127 spectrum. Let’s look at the changes.

-64	Original	+32	+64

This one’s definitely a little more interesting! The negative value should reduce the contrast, making the colors closer together — the opposite of trying to increase the contrast. We’ve got a gray background and everything is rather dusky compared to the original. Now look at the positive values. There’s quite a difference between the original and the +32. The colors are much more vibrant and a bit less transparent. The overlap colors, though are less easy to see as the contrast is being applied to them, too. Lighter colors get light, darker colors get dark. Finally on the +64, many of the hexagons have lost their transparency; the difference between the different shades on each color hexagon have been pushed to their maximums. Extreme changes in contrast can take out subtle details as the colors are moved to their maximum contrast. But wow, the colors really look so vivid and bright!

Combining Brightness and Contrast

Take a look at what happens when both brightness and contrast are applied. In GIMP, the same control sets both the contrast and the brightness in the same box; I set both of them to the indicated number.

-64	Original	+32	+64

Now we have something in between the previous results. We still have our details and the look of the layering of translucent colors, but look at the color shift from the original, particularly in the positive values. The purple color shifts almost equal to the magenta, the oranges are nearly yellow, and the greens are much yellower. Somehow, the blues seem to be brighter, but not quite as shifted as the rest of the colors. To be sure, the +32 and +64 images might be seen as “better,” if you wanted brighter colors. But if you want them to print as the original, these are going to be quite disappointing.

Saturation

Saturated color is pure color, desaturated color is basically the grayscale that’s left after taking out the color (like a black and white photo). Here are the effects of negative, then positive saturation. In GIMP, these work on a scale factor: the negative equivalent is a number under 1, the positive equivalent is a number between 1 and 10.

0.5000	Original	1.5000	3.000

Wait, why isn’t there a gray background on the 0.500 like the others? Well, white, being no color at all (like pure grays and black) is already as saturated/desaturated as it can be. But look at the colors of the color wheel. It’s like they’ve all been shaded a bit — gray has been added to them. (Honestly, I kinda like that color palette, but not if I want vivid colors). Looking at the 1.500 saturation, you can see that all the colors are much more intense, but the details in the overlapping translucency colors is getting lost. The magenta, red, and light green colors all look solid. Moving to the 3.000 saturation scaling, nearly all the colors are quite shifted. The dark green is lighter but the light green is darker. The orange is almost indistinguishable from the red, and purple and magenta are nearly identical. While these colors are undeniably vibrant, they aren’t correct if you want to print the original.

Combining Brightness, Contrast, and Saturation

Combining all three, this is essentially what the printer is doing to your artwork when you set all three.

-64/0.5000	Original	+32/1.5000	+64/3.000

Seeing the negative values, this is the opposite effect of what we want and shows us what the three settings will attempt to change. The +32/1.5000 is undeniably vibrant and brilliant, but it’s missing a lot of detail and colors are off. Moving to applying the higher effects, we find that we have plain shapes of colors that have lost any translucent detail. The detail has been blown out and the colors distorted to their purest colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and the secondary colors (in the CMYK color world) Red, Green, and Blue. Undeniably vibrant, but it’s also not at all the same image as the original.

The intentional detail in the colors of the overlapping, translucent shapes is really important here to show what happens with color correction. Colors are stretched and pushed into their purest, lightest, and brightest hue. Important details and colors can shift quite dramatically. If I had used flat areas of color with no details made of similar colors to see how these shifts affect them, I might come to the conclusion that the third or fourth pictures above give me the “best” colors. But they aren’t the truest colors.

The Detailed Artwork Image

Next I used a favorite image of mine that is quite colorful, but I like the colors to be a bit more delicate with the shades and tints of colors providing a lot of the detail of the image. The colors should be clear and colorful, like a watercolor, but should not turn into electric teals or Pepto-Bismol pink. It depicts spring flowers in a Mason jar on my reflective, glass table on the screened-in porch with the trees leafing out in the background. While these aren’t colors that match anything in the real world, there are limits as to how far colors can be changed before the colors don’t look right. And, since I’m the artist, I know what I want it to look like and I want it to print/press what I see on the screen. This file is a PNG and has no transparent pixels because the image does not have a background that is white or non-printing.

Brightness

This is the function affects how light or dark the image is. I did this in GIMP. The GIMP scale goes from -127 to +127, so I chose the numbers -64 (about halfway to darkest setting), +32 (about a quarter of the way to the lightest setting), and +64 (about halfway to the maximum lightest value). This gives us a good range to illustrate what happens as brightness changes. See the images, below.

-64	Original	+32	+64

As I did with the vivid image, the first picture shows a negative brightness — the colors go to gray, as does the background. Again, all pixels in the image are affected by the brightness options which includes any background, even white pixels. The image doesn’t look bad, does it? But it doesn’t look accurate. The other settings at +32 and +64 get a quite bit lighter. They look quite faded. Note that I used GIMP to apply identical settings to this image as I did to the vivid image.

Contrast

Contrast looks at the difference between the lights and the darks.

-64	Original	+32	+64

As we saw with the vivid image, reducing the contrast makes a much duskier image that obscures the detail. If we started with this image, we might be able to change the contrast to get to the original (which is pretty cool). Now look increased contrast values. The colors are getting more vibrant, but are losing substantial detail. The leafy, spring green background becomes quite yellow while the pink flower petals are losing detail. The blue on the table has gone from a subtle teal with some purply shadows to a bright teal with magenta patches. Yes, the colors are vivid and bright, but they have lost the detail and subtlety that I like with the original image. The vivid image with its flat, bright colors didn’t change nearly as much as this much more detailed image with colors that aren’t as bright.

Combining Brightness and Contrast

Like I did with the vivid image, I applied both brightness and contrast settings to the image.

-64	Original	+32	+64

Here we see how combing the two is really distorting the image. While the +32 on the vivid image still seemed to preserve its colors and details, this image changes to be much lighter and details are “blown out.” One might like the color changes, but it doesn’t have the same look or feel as the original. It’s particularly noticeable with the +64 image, which doesn’t look like a useable image when compared to the original.

Saturation

Saturated color is pure color, desaturated color is basically the grayscale that’s left after taking out the color (like a black and white photo).

0.5000	Original	1.5000	3.000

This is a nice selection of pictures to show saturation. The desaturated look that adds grays isn’t bad and could work quite well. Increasing the saturation gets progressively bolder colors that lose subtle details. The watercolor nature of the image starts looking more like it’s bold, flat colors. They each have their own look — but which one do you want to print? I’d prefer that the printer prints the original version, but the recommended printer settings are going to be somewhere between the two on the right.

Combining Brightness, Contrast, and Saturation

Combining all three, this is essentially what the printer is doing to your artwork when you set all three.

-64/0.5000	Original	+32/1.5000	+64/3.000

Combining all three, there’s a pretty substantial chance that the image is quite distorted. In the vivid artwork, it was still fairly recognizable, albeit with very changed colors. Here, the details that make up the image are significantly diminished and the colors are too bright. What worked adequately well for the vivid image does not work at all for the detailed artwork.

The Photo Image

Lastly, I used a favorite image of mine. It’s picture my dad took of me as a child. The photo isn’t a perfect, professional photo, but it’s a treasured snapshot, much like many that would wind up sublimated onto mugs, mousepads, and keychains. Color shifts on a photograph will be extremely noticeable. As this is a scanned photo, it began life as a JPG, but for the purposes of this exercise, was stored as a PNG with no transparent pixels.

Brightness

As stated before, brightness affects the lightness (or darkness) of the image. This image could probably use to be brightened a bit.

-64	Original	+32	+64

The negative brightness gives us the expected darker, grayer image, while the positive brightness makes the photo lighter. In this particular case, the image looks better when brightened! Brightness, like these other settings, has definite benefits and is a very useful tool in the arsenal of making images look great. Looking at the three image sets, the vivid image was a bit too light, the detailed image was terribly light, and the selected photo image actually is improved (to a point, the +64 might be a bit too light).

Contrast

Contrast looks at the difference between the lights and the darks. This is a pretty dark photo, so it’s interesting to see how contrast works on this picture.

-64	Original	+32	+64

As we saw with the vivid image, reducing the contrast makes a much duskier image that obscures the detail. But in this case, it evens out some of the shadowing on the face, Perhaps using contrast of, say -15 might work pretty well to remove the shadows without much gray. Fortunately, in the software, there’s a slider bar to adjust the contrast with real-time updates on the screen, no having to guess at what number there is. (The reason there’s a number is that the algorithm, or program, uses that as part of the equations applied to the colors so it can be reproduced later, perhaps if you have the same lighting situation with all the children photographed in the same light so the colors can be shifted identically.) Adding contrast, though, makes the dark shadows on the face much too dark, eventually obliterating much of the facial detail.

Combining Brightness and Contrast

Like the others, I applied both brightness and contrast settings to the image.

-64	Original	+32	+64

Reducing the brightness and contrast makes it a very gray picture, but that gives us an idea of what is removed or remedied by increasing the brightness and contrast. Removing the gray has does seem to make a difference, but skin tones are getting an unnatural cast. The vivid and detailed artwork seemed to get lighter and the colors were still “true enough” to the original, those same settings just aren’t looking good for this photo.

Saturation

Saturated color is pure color, desaturated color is basically the grayscale that’s left after taking out the color (like a black and white photo).

0.5000	Original	1.5000	3.000

Desaturating gives an interesting appearance, much like a hand-tinted black and white photo. Stands to reason as desaturation will remove the color taking it to pure gray tones (white and black being the lightest and darkest “pure gray”). Removing the gray and pushing it to the purest tones can really change real-world colors. Look at the skin tones and how they move to unnaturally orange-red skin tones. The blue bow and dress still look cute (nobody knows how blue that bow is supposed to be), but everybody knows that child isn’t orange. In fact, the 3.000 saturation is so oversaturated that the colors are beginning to make the right side of the face look deformed. The other images still look usable, though the colors are too bright and there’s a loss of detail from the original, but if one had never seen the original, it would still be a reasonable image. These pictures, particularly the right-most one, clearly has major color problems.

Combining Brightness, Contrast, and Saturation

Combining all three, this is essentially what the printer is doing to your artwork when you set all three.

-64/0.5000	Original	+32/1.5000	+64/3.000

None of these color correction combinations, which mimic what the “suggested” printer settings are, will do this photo justice. The vivid and detailed artwork images still can be usable if they don’t have to match the original, but for photos, these colors are too far off, not to mention how much the image is distorted because the colors actually change the shape of the hair, face, and hat.

This is the main source of the orangey-red skin tones that people complain of on various chat groups. The color correction settings are set far too high for most artwork and photographs.

Summarizing Color Correction Settings

Yes, this was a long and somewhat redundant view of three settings, alone and in combination. Some of them, like the negative values, aren’t used by the printer, but I chose to include those for two reasons.

1. If you can see the difference between the negative version and the original, you can see one more in the spectrum of what that function does. You might find this useful in editing your pictures in a photo editor like GIMP or Photoshop. If you have an old photo that is grayish and doesn’t have a lot of contrast, perhaps you can look at using saturation and brightness to breathe new life into it. Or, if you have an image that you love, but it’s too bright, try reducing the saturation to get more muted tones.
2. Showing how this works on three different kinds of artwork shows that there is no one-size-fits-all for color correction. What makes some artwork vibrant and awesome can make another piece looking void of details and a photo looking all wrong.

I see so many people compare screen shots and a pressed item and wonder why there are such discrepancies between the two. These specific settings change the colors in very predictable ways:

• Colors that are vivid are really vivid, though sometimes they lose detail and can change colors. Sometimes those color changes aren’t bad, though, as a slightly more magenta purple or a slightly more blue purple might not matter to the outcome.
• Colors that are colorful but light, or contain subtle details, end up in the electric tones. The colors are too vibrant and details in the shading gets blown out as the colors start to change too much. When the colors are pushed too far, the subtleties of shaded details get pushed to the same color as the part of the image they are shading, so the detail is lost.
• Colors that are pastel, muted, or dark end up shifting a lot. Maroons brighten up to red, olive greens can turn leafy green, golden tones turn orangey-yellow.
• Colors that have to match something in the real world, like a photo of a person, a fall foliage landscape, or even your favorite team’s color, will not print properly.

So, What Settings Should I Use?

Automatic color correction.

Do not change the brightness, contrast, or saturation on your printer. Just don’t, unless your day job includes changing these settings on a printer on a regular basis and you understand what you’re changing. (And don’t use an ICC profile, either.)

Instead, find yourself a good photo editor program like GIMP or Adobe Photoshop (there are LOTS of them out there!). Use the settings inside the program to slider bar on contrast or saturation until the image looks how you’d like it. Do lots of test pressing on 100% polyester fabric (that gives you the most accurate colors as opposed to a cotton/poly blend), then change the brightness, contrast, and saturation where you can see it on the screen. It won’t take long to learn how to dial in amazing colors this way. In fact, you may not need to change a lot of colors at all!

So Why Do These Settings Exist?

Back in the olden days (like the 1990’s), somebody was working at a sublimation shop and wished they could do it at home. Someone who has knowledge of inks and printheads notices that the Epson printheads are the same kind as these professional sublimation printers. They take a bit of ink home from the shop and put it into their personal printer. And it worked! But because the CMYK inks are made for a different, very high-end printers that puts down perhaps more ink that has a slightly more dilute formulation (I’m guessing), the tweaking began. All of these put down more color to compensate. The WorkForce printers suddenly become popular for home sublimation, so helpful people create cute little images that have all this helpful information.

Meanwhile, the ink manufacturers sense a way to make money. They manufacture a new formulation specifically for Epson printers. Epson comes out with these fancy new tank printers, so the manufacturers make a better ink for them. Technology gets better so it’s easier to perfectly match the genuine ink colors with the sublimation ink dyes. The better their ink works without people knowing secret codes, the more money they make. And here’s the thing, people like the look of these secret codes, too (at least until they do photos or something).

However, a funny thing happens on the internet. Sites that have a lot of hits get bumped up in the search results. Sites with lots of hits tend to have been around a while. Older sites with lots of hits go to the top of search results, gathering more and more hits. It keeps this information front and center. Old information actually can get reinforced as current, so people searching for, “Epson sublimation printer settings” will likely get old information, especially since there aren’t major corporations (like car companies, national food brands, or other advertisers) to pay to boost current information in the search engines. So the old information hangs around forever, unless something can finally get hits. Meanwhile, bloggers and message groups, keep repeating the same information.

And people who want to convert for sublimation really want to do something. It can’t be as easy as dumping in different ink and changing four settings for graphics quality and one more for mirroring, can it? I mean, it seems really — professional or something — to be able to change these hidden settings!

Disclaimer: I don’t know for certain that this is what happened; it’s what I’ve pieced together from many sites on the internet that include professional sublimation printer forums, Reddits, and such. I do know that searches prioritize paid sites first, then sites with the most lifetime hits, making sure that old information never dies. And I very much want to believe that I have some mystical information, like secret codes, that make my colors amazing and elevate my work. (Alas, you can look at my other blog entries here and see that I really tried to make these settings work, but the color experts at Epson kinda know what they’re doing. Also, it’s worth learning about your press settings that can make a world of difference in your colors, too.

As someone who has worked with computers and printers for over 40 years, I’ve never seen any group ever suggest changing the color correction settings on the printer. Why? It’s SO much easier to do on the computer where you can see the changes on the screen in real-time. We’ve determined that using a number (whether it’s 7, 9, or 14 on the printer, or +31 or +63 on an editor) doesn’t give perfect results. Instead of guessing, use an editor where you can see the changes. So use the printer defaults and let the software do the work for you. Your colors will thank you!