[eye4clr]

Waoh tiger! That's a lot of stuff there...

How do you guys set up your print room lighting?

Replace your 'standard' flourescents with 5500-6000K bulbs with the highest Color Rendering Index (CRI) you can find or care to pay for. Then set your monitor calibration to 500-1000k higher to get a better visual match. The fussier you get with this process, the more you combine the visual reference of white and grays between the display and printed pieces. I prefer to go down the middle of the road and not obsess too much about the monitor but quite a bit about the lighting.

My print room is also my office! and so im using the same lighting to proof on my monitor as i do for the printing

If the color temperature, in other words the color of the light, doesn't match between your room or viewing condition and the color of white in the monitor, then they won't match - this is a hard and fast rule. The whites have to match along with the brightness.

what ive noticed is that i get a magenta cast over a lot of images, especially sky blues and gradients of blues

totally subjective here without an objective approach. Your print system's job is to print the color in the file. Not what you see on screen, or what your laser printer puts out, or ***shudder*** what the customer's desktop inkjet prints. What you need to determine is if the printer is producing true to the digital file. Grays are the easiest to judge since its pretty straight forward if gray is neutral or not......uh, the lighting plays a big part here though

If the lighting is not 5000-5500K, then the grey shouldn't look perfectly neutral even if they are in the file and your print system renders them perfectly. But regardless of this, if its really wacked, you'll know it. If you're not making your own profiles from scratch, it usually is pretty nasty.

I save my work as TIFF @ EuroscaleCoated V2

Are you in Europe? If so, that may be a good choice, i don't really know what would fit best. But in the US, you should go with US Web Coated SWOP purely in the interest of conforming to the common folk's default settings. So, if you are in Europe, your best choice is to use whatever the default for CMYK is in your region and don't try to go for some larger gamut profile for CMYK since this will only add complexity and additional opportunity for mistakes. If you want more gamut from the files you design, work in AdobeRGB and setup your RIP to match that for its input profile.

And no, the ppi doesn't cause banding unless its REALLY low - like 10ppi.

I also have my Adobe workspace set to Adobe1998 default and in the View menu i have my Proof Setup checked on Working CMYK.

If i understand what you're referring to correctly, all this does is strive for a 'softproof' of your images as your current CMYK working space. It doesn't affect your file per se, only how it displays in Photoshop. This could partly account for the significant differences in the appearance between Photoshop and VW.

Happy printing!