Yesterday was an interesting day for me as I made my first efforts into printing with Colourburst RIP and the Epson 4880 printer I just received on Thursday.

Since the RIP does not come with the Museo Silver Rag environments - the profile and linearisation files, I down loaded them as a free set up from Colourburst's web site. Installation was a breeze as the zip file came with a very easy to follow 'how to' guide which simply explained which files to put into which directories.

Reading the RIP manual was straight forward.

Now, for the printing experience. I had some issues last night printing from CS5 to the RIP and discovered that printing directly from CS5 is to be avoided for two reasons. Firstly, CS5 tries to colour manage the file for you, so you get two applications of colour management (and therefore a substandard print), and both CS5 and Colourburst both try to manage the file sizes too.

I followed the recommendations of saving a copy to the Hot Folder from CS5. You turn off the layers in the PSD file. The file appeared in the Queue with the correct sizing and printed out beautifully.

I must in future, try to read all the manuals.

I find the quality of the output is astounding. The RIP comes with a lot of profiles for paper types, and the Museo Silver Rag was available as a free download. It's been very quick and easy for me to get the printing up to speed and I should note that it's really a case of getting familiar with the software (and printer hardware). Cutting corners without reading manuals (esp the Epson 4880 manual), will stop you from getting the most from the printing asI found last night. I was getting some very substandard prints because I was trying to print directly from CS5.

Anyway, I'm off to Eigg today to do a week workshop. But I'm feeling very happy with my results and I can only thank once again Kyriakos and also Neil Barstow from Colourmanagement.net for putting me on the right track.