PSE8 vs printer color management anomaly

Question

PSE8 refuses to print my images correctly if I turn off concurrent color management by the printer.  Everything I have read states that if I enable PSE to  manage colors, then I must turn off color management by the printer.  That's not the way my situation works, and I do not understand why. Unless I enable both PSE8 to manage colors (via Print-->More Options-->Color Management tab), and the Epson to manage colors (by not turning ICM off in the Epson driver), I get consistently muddy prints.  If I enable PSE color management, and at the same time set the Epson Color Controls to gamma 1.8 (or 2.2) and Color Mode to Epson Vivid, I get gorgeous prints. That is not the way it is supposed to work, but I have 65 experimental prints over the last 2 weeks, varying every setting in both programs, to prove it.  Would appreciate some opinions, facts, explanations, etc. please. Thanks.  JBB2

Answer 1

At its core, color management is just a translator. I like to think of it as similar to correcting pronunciation in spoken language so that people from different regions can understand each other when reading aloud the same word. For example, where I grew up the city not far away called Versailles was pronounced as ver-sails, while in France the city for which our local one was named is pronounced vair-sigh. If a Frenchman asked directions of a local he'd get a balnk stare unless he knew the local pronunciation.
Color management looks at the numbers coming in (that's all digital color is), determines the source of the numbers so that it can understand how the source thinks they should be represented (prounounced, if you will) by the device or application making the image, then "translates" those numbers into a new set of numbers that will be identically represented at the destination, or "phonetically" the same. In many case the differences in the numbers will be very subtle or even non-existent. In other cases they will be quite radical. The biggest areas of concern are usually the edges of the color gamut for the output device and whether certain colors can be prodcued at all, and if not, how will color be shifted throughout the image. Do you fix only the out-of gamut colors, or shift everything a little so relationships are preserved? That's the rendering intent.
When I say double managed I mean that your application has seen the destination profile for the output device and made corrections in the numbers to match that device without further intervention, thendevice makes new transformations from those numbers based on some unknown algorithm. In all honesty I have no idea how printers do color management internally or what they are trying to do, whether it is removing color casts or boosting saturation, or whatever. If the numbers sent don't require further adjustment, then anything the printer management is doing is taking you away from "correct" (or intended) reproduction.
This does not mean that the result is not going to be pleasing to the viewer, or even more pleasing, just that it no longer accurately reflects the original. This is a major battle for those of us who do things like museum catalogs. Some paintings cannot be represented well in print because the artist uses colors that are well outside the press gamut. Other times there may be shadow or highlight detail in the original that gets lost without very careful adjustment of curves, and finding a balance between all the elements to create a "fair representation" is the goal.
With a photograph taken in "the wild" you have a lot of leeway for adjusting colors, brightness, and contrast to render a subject you find pleasing to the eye. If the grass is a shade of green that we expect and the snow isn't purple, most of us will presume the photo is "correct" when in fact if you take your print back to the original scene it amy look quite different. That's OK, as long as it looks the way YOU wanted it to look.
The problem with double management is that you've lost control of what the print will look like since you can't predict what the printer is going to do to any particular image beyond some general trend. I think the places like Costco probably lighten all images generally and boost saturation and contrast because doing that can make a marginally dark photo look "better" without doing an unacceptable amount of damage to a well-exposed image presented to an average viewer.