At some point in the life of every Epson printer (and others as well) you get some sort of ink smudge that you can’t get rid of.  There are all sorts of smudge patterns, but one pattern is a sort of smudge line on the left side of the print (facing the printer).

You will go through agony cleaning every bit of the machines innards, from changing the box that collects ink excess, to running paper towels soaked with Windex through it, to whatever tricks you’ve learned.  Some of these tricks will work – eventually.

But you, like me – are in the business of churning out prints for customers and you don’t have time to wait for the thing to dry out and come back to it’s senses.  This little trick will fix this one particular issue.

Suppose your print is an 8 x 12 inch image and you are printing on 13 x 19 inch paper (this is just for demonstration purposes).  Open the print in Photoshop and change the canvas size so that there is room (now this is looking at the image on the monitor) so that you have a good wide margin on the right side of the image.  (You can click that relative button in the canvas setting so that the image remains on the left and margin width increases on the right).

Create a second layer to draw on.  And here’s the big finale: draw a straight gray line on the right side, close to the paper margin, but not so far that you get the dreaded: this is larger than what will fit, some clipping will occur, message.

And so, what you do is fake the print head into dropping down to draw that vertical gray line (actually any light color will work) and whatever smudging you’ll get will be on the right side of the smudge (looking at image on screen) or left side, looking at the print.

And so – no smudge for client.  And it also gives all the stuff you’ve done to diagnose and fix the smudge to go into effect.

If you are printing in Lightroom – there is no way I’ve found to duplicate this.  You’d think there would be a way to use one of those guidelines, or crop marks even, or something to print, but I haven’t found a way and so I have to put the file into Photoshop to use this bit of trickery.