I've put a modified version of the print plugin on http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/print.tar.gz. This has a number of improvements, some generic and some mostly directed at the Epson Stylus Photo EX. The specific improvements are: 1) Support for 6-color mode for the Stylus Photo EX (and presumably, 700, but not the 1200 or 750, and probably not the original Stylus Photo). 2) 16 bpp lookup tables (vs. 8 in the current code). This gives more precision in the calculations, and avoids a lot of stair stepping behavior that I observed in very light tones. Currently only the Photo EX driver uses this code; the plugin actually generates both 8 and 16 bit LUT's, and the individual drivers decide which set to use. Fixing this isn't hard, but I don't have a whole lot of time for this (my wife's getting tired of me being holed up in the basement!) 3) Separate LUT's for RGB and composite. The composite channel is equivalent to the current LUT; again, the RGB LUT's are currently only used by the Photo EX driver. This is trivial to fix in all the drivers. 4) New controls: gamma correction, contrast, and RGB levels. Doubtless someone with better grounding in the theory here (I have none whatsoever) can come up with better algorithms. In particular, the contrast control is overly sensitive. The gamma correction doesn't do the right thing (start with the printer's defined gamma correction). Again, none of this is too hard to fix. If you want to play with the new controls, I'd suggest starting with gamma of 0.45 and contrast of 95 (on the Photo EX). These print two very different images quite nicely, although there are still some specific improvements (poor fine detail in the highlights and dark midtones, less than ideal transition between black and CMY, and possibly overly dark dark-midtones are really about it right now). It isn't what I'd really call photo quality, although I don't think that the Photo EX isn't really capable of that (the Photo 750 and 1200 are, but they have some additional stuff that the EX doesn't). It's definitely good enough to use as a proof, though, and it's significantly better quality than output I've seen from a Stylus 600 printed from Windows. It certainly isn't polished, but it's worth getting out there for other people to play with. As for the reverse engineering stuff I was talking about, somebody sent me a test file, and I was unable to learn anything from it that helped me. So right now I'm basically just using stuff from the original plugin, the material published on Epson's developer web site, and my own ideas. -- Robert Krawitz <rlk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/ Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@xxxxxxxxxxxx "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton
