Kick Your Epson into Gear

Kick Your Epson into Gear — If you have an Epson Color Stylus printer (see TidBITS-266), you might be interested in two handy Photoshop utilities to improve the color accuracy and the quality of high-resolution images. The first utility, KS Labs Epson Ink 2.52, comes from Guy Kuo <[email protected]>, and it improves color saturation and accuracy when printing from Photoshop 3.0 by letting Photoshop separate colors using custom ink settings for the Epson Color Stylus. The second utility, called Better Epson, is a fat binary Photoshop plug-in from Thomas Keller <[email protected]>. Better Epson prints RGB, bitmapped images with better speed and/or better print quality. The Macintosh drivers Epson ships with the printer apparently don’t produce true 720-dpi output; Better Epson provides a better dithering methods that can (theoretically) give true 720-dpi output, though results vary depending on the type of image being printed. [GD]