Color management accross two printers.

Hi,
We have two printers at work, one Epson Stylas Photo R1800 and one HP DesignJet Z2100. They want the colors to match across both printers for printing photographs, and do not want to use any RIP software.
I have tried
- getting the application to manage colors, with the Adobe RGB 1998 profile (having changed the document to this profile first)
- both printers to print with Adobe RGB 1998 profile using printer managed colors (with document in Adobe RGB 1998 profile)
- getting the application to manage colors with the print driver selected for the printer I am printing to in the print profile section of the adobe dialogue box (and the driver turned off in the printer dialogue box) and the image converted to CMYK.
- Same as the above but with proof checked in photoshop dialogue box
- lots of variations of the above trying different rendering intents
Whenever I let application manage colors, the prints come out very dark (and not the same dark colors across both printers). I am using the same paper for both printers.
Apparently the colors were not different until we upgraded to CS3 (before I joined the company)
Any suggestions?

Not to sound jerky, but I might suggest buying a RIP. That's gonna be your best way to get prints to match. That, and to make a custom profile for each printer. You'll have the world at your fingertips. If your world is about color matching... which mine is!
That being said, I've goofed around with making a custom RGB profile for my Epson 7800 and had some luck with it. Your standard print drivers are always RGB. Even if you send CMYK, it converts to RGB and then back to its own CMYK when you print. Essentially, you will print an RGB target, use a spectrophotometer to read them in and make an RGB profile from it. Then, every image you print, you convert (not assign) to this profile. It's been a while since I tried this, but I'm pretty sure I turned off color management in the print dialog in order for this to work right. Again, this is not completely optimal but it's better than nothing.
If you don't have a spectrophotometer or software to make a profile, you should be able to find services online that can help you out, or ask a friendly color managed printer in town if they have a color management guru they turn to.

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    Calibrated the printer several times and created .icc profiles
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    I have Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5 Extended.  I use Lightroom to import raw files into the catalog and to do basic editing.  From there, I publish to Smugmug as .TIFF files - directly from Lightroom.  I also export files from Lightroom to Photoshop CS5 Extended and save them as .PSD and .JPEG files.  The files that I export to Smugmug look pretty good - similar to what I see on my screen.  My real conundrum is with the Epson printer and Lightroom/Photoshop.  What I see on my monitor is very different from what prints.  From both platforms.  As a rule, the shots are too dark and the colors are often very muted.  This is especially true with images of people and skin tones.  They often come out looking pale gray or blue.
    Right now, my solution is to tweak and print until I get something close enough to print, while the image on my monitor looks horrible.  Needless to say, this is not a viable solution for the long term - it is too expensive and time consuming.  I've tried to read and then adjust adjust both programs, but I'm confused as to what to set where.  I've taken to explorting Lightroom files into Photoshop to use the soft-proof capability.  it works better but still not great and not consistent.  When I do the Photoshop soft-proof, I see signficant portions of most images as "out of gamut>"  I also notice that these areas are often the ones with odd colors.
    My problem, (well, one of them) is the multitude of menus that have color management inputs - how do I make sure they are all working together and reinforcing each other instead of working at cross purposes?  In Lightroom, I have Page Setup and Print Preferences, as well as Color Management options in the Print Module right hand panel.  In Photoshop, I have Print and Page setups, as well as Color Management menus.  There are also the Proof menus to consider.
    In Photoshop, softproofing, I think I ned to select teh printer profile so that Photoshop is showing me how the printer will interpret the color space.  I also think I need to be consistent in how I define the workspace - from Nikon to Lightroom to Photoshop to Epson.  If I use ProPhoto with my camera do I need to use that in every circumstance?  Should I switch to Adobe RGB?  I have printer setting color space turned off in both LR and PS.
    Can someone walk me through any or all of this?  Right now, all of these moving parts is making me dizzy.  It's said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.  This proves the point.  Three months ago, I had color management problems but had no idea what such a thing was.  Now, I know a lot more about it, but my results are no better - worse in some respects.  Anyone who can help will earn major Karma points and hae my undying gratitude for several months.  Sorry - that's all the compensation I can offer!
    Thanks in advance for any help.

    Lundberg02 wrote:
    is that the hand of God in the picture?
    That was a nearly mature tornado forming in Nebraska, and it dissipated at the last moment because at that time the sun went down and the temperature dropped rapidly.  I was glad, because I was camping in a travel trailer at the time, and everyone knows trailers attract tornados. 
    Lundberg02 wrote:
    Please explain why and under what circumstances anyone would want to use a device independent profile as a monitor profile, which should be a device dependent profile.
    Here's one example, to answer your specific question:
    You have a monitor that provides sRGB performance (e.g., via a specific sRGB setting).  You judge (and/or ensure via your own calibration) that it provides satisfactory sRGB color accuracy for your needs, so you set the monitor profile to sRGB, which is accurate in this case. 
    What does this do for you?
    Images displayed in Internet Explorer, which assumes your monitor is sRGB regardless of your profile, are now properly color-managed because you have made IE's assumption valid.  By the way, Microsoft does not appear to be going to change this behavior any time soon.
    Untagged images, considering a majority of untagged images assume sRGB encoding, are displayed properly by apps that just pass them through to the display.  Some browsers do this.
    sRGB images (the majority) are displayed properly by non-color-managed apps.  If you choose to set your preferred working space to sRGB, then your own processed images will display properly using your non-color-managed apps.  Such apps include various viewers, the thumbnails in Windows Explorer, etc.
    The sRGB IEC61966-2.1 profile is a clean, well-formed color profile and works well in virtually every color-managed application. It's the Windows default, so you can imagine most apps are very well tested with it.
    Screen grabs are already in the sRGB color space, so if your working space is sRGB then you gain simplicity and don't have gotchas when mixing screen grabs back into your workflow.
    Since the color-gamut is not wide, the distance between adjacent colors in a 24 bit color environment is smaller - the display of gradients looks smoother, and you might not crave 30 bit color quite so much.
    There are other subtle advantages as well, simply because so much of software development throughout history has assumed the representation of color images on computers is sRGB. It's akin to "going with the flow".
    In short, setting up a soup-to-nuts sRGB system means more images match more often across more applications with a system set up this way.  If I'm not mistaken, that's about what the original poster is asking about, which is why RikRamsay's response is not unreasonable.
    And there are, of course, some specific disadvantages to doing this. 
    For one thing, one does not have the direct ability to work with a wider gamut of colors.  There are those who wish to work in wider gamut color spaces, have wide gamut monitors, and wide gamut printers.  Brighter, better managed colors may well help such a person set his/her work off from the crowd.  This is starting to become more and more important in this day and age of better and better wide gamut hardware.
    It's not straightforward to set up a system so that its sRGB response is accurate, though it is doable.  Can you trust the factory sRGB calibration of a monitor that advertises sRGB response characteristics?
    -Noel

  • Color Management Issues Solved in LR 1.1?

    Long tempted to switch from Elements 5.0 to LR (or to integrate the two), I have held off because I've read on this forum dozens, probably hundreds, of complaints about LR 1.0 and color management. Some of these questions were clearly from ignorance, I know (such as not understanding the difference between the color space used by monitors and that used by printers). But many other were from sophisticated users all of whom began their comments or questions with "Works perfectly in Photoshop, but in LR ..." See, for example, http://adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.3bc41850/39 , which describes difficulty in getting LR to produce acceptable prints. To my mind, LR 1.0 had color management problems even if the highest end users managed to work around them. I don't want to buy into problems, not being a sophisticated user yet myself. So here is my queston: Does LR 1.1 solve these problems? That is, does LR 1.1 work as easily, or almost as easily, as Photoshop (say with the HP b9180, which has a PS plugin)? Thanks in advance.

    The problem is that lightroom is somehow throwing the default profile that is set in colorsync into the mix. Which is something that Photoshop is not doing. So any printer profiles built by printing a target with PS is not going to be accurate when printed through Lightroom unless the default profile for you printer is Generic RGB Profile or something close.
    Here is what I have posted elsewhere about my discovery of this issue.
    I discovered something today that just might be the answer to the color printing problems from Lightroom.
    First of all, all prints from PS and Lightroom was done with the same color management workflow with the profiles set in the application and color management turned off in the printer driver. This was to a Canon iPF9000.
    Started when I tried to print from a new MacPro with Lightroom. Colors were not right.
    Went to the G5 and printed from lightroom same file same settings same profile, color was correct.
    Printed same file same setting same profile from PS on the MacPro. Color was correct.
    So started printing and saving as PDF from the print dialog. Open the PDF files in Acrobat and checking embedded profile with Pitstop.
    Here are the results.
    Lightroom on Macpro: iPF9000 Paper profile. This was much darker with way to much yellow.
    Photoshop of Macpro: Generic RGB
    Lightroom on G5: sRGB v1.20 (Canon)
    I had uninstall the sRGB v1.20 (Canon) profile from the colorsync folder on the MacPro. Added sRGB v1.20 (Canon) back in and guess what. sRGB v1.20 (Canon) in the PDF now generated from Lightroom. Print to the printer from Lightroom on the MacPro and it now printed correct.
    Now got to thinking were does Lightroom get this (sRGB v1.20 (Canon) profile from. So checked in the Colorsync utility to see what the default profile for the iPF9000 is and sure enough it was sRGB v1.20 (Canon). Ok so what happens if I change the default profile in the Colorsync utility to Adobe RGB. Now guess what the Lightroom generated PDF now shows Adobe RGB as the embedded profile.
    PS printed to PDF showed Generic RGB profile no matter what I set as the default profile in the Colorsync Utility.
    Clearly Lightroom behaves differently when printing when a different default profile is selected for a printer. On Windows this could be the same as one can set in the printer properties (at least for the iPF9000) the default profile to automatic or set a different default profile manually.
    This raises an interesting question as to what is really going on with print files set to a printer. Especially printers with much larger gamuts than sRGB.
    Could this be the source of the strange Lightroom printing problems?
    I do know when I have tried to make a profile from a printed target in LR I could not get accurate color. But the profile generated for a target printed in PS works fine in LR.

  • Invalid Color Management in Lightroom? (RAW)

    I've noticed the strange thing, how Adobe Camera RAW 4.1.1 displays the same image differently in Photoshop CS3 & Lightroom 1.4.1
    Here are the screenshots from both programs:
    What I've got in Lightroom/develop mode:
    http://www.imagebam.com/image/956c3d6537871
    What I've got in Photoshop:
    http://www.imagebam.com/image/17a67c6537874
    Notice the reds on the face and oranges on the trees on the background. 1) Face on second, photoshop variant is more reddish. 2) The contrast differs as well!
    3) There is more orange on the leaves on the second image.
    That's all happens in the preview in Lightroom - if I export image as a JPEG and open it in Photoshop - the images will be the same. But BEFORE the export they're DIFFERENT! What's wrong?
    (Image is shot on Sony Alpha 350, white balance and all the settings in Camera RAW are the same in two programs).

    >yes they are, but in practice PDF causes lot's of bugs.
    My experience is opposite in that pdf is usually the only thing that actually works for multipage documents and things containing vector graphics. For single page photos of course tiff always works, but there are lots of clueless operators that do not know their behind from a color profile.
    >In my experience colors will be different even for an eye of a consumer. On some printers red will be more reddish, on others green more greenish etc. The contrast will differ either. Maybe you and we use different printers. BTW I work on Windows, maybe that's the point.
    I have always had basically perfect results. There was a time when Lightroom interacted wrong with printer drivers when you used profiles inside of the program instead of having the printer driver manage for you. This has long been fixed. Of course there are subtle differences between printers and it would be good if Lightroom had some sort of soft proofing to judge this in advance. The differences are usually pretty minor though nowadays.
    >Well, Noritsu, as I know, for example, uses its own color management profile, which you cannot tune even in Photoshop. If you use sRGB, it will be ignored, and you'll get a very low contrast print with desaturated color and you have to be there when it's printed to tune it with the lab assistant. Usually they do it themselves ... well... good. I have SOME good experience with Costco. But for many cases I can't get my colors and contrast without being there when it's printed. And it depends on paper - is it metallic, for example, or matte. The picture will be different. The colors will be different. And you can't check it exactly on your monitor being at home, or in office.
    I tested this extensively. If you do this right, it is very hard to see the difference between a sRGB print and a print converted to the profile. With well-tuned Noritsus, you get a small difference in oranges, and a tiny difference in greens - independent of the paper you use. This is the whole point of these machines. If you feed them sRGB, they should give you great results. Maybe my local costcos is very good, but I doubt they are very different from other labs. I tried both Matte and Glossy and they both showed the same result. This is borne out by softproofing in Photoshop that shows exactly the same effect. Note that I wrote about using lab profiles with Lightroom extensively and always tell people to use the profile, but in reality it really is not that important.
    See for example: http://lagemaat.blogspot.com/2008/05/great-prints-from-labs.html
    If you see large differences in contrast and saturation, there really is something wrong with your calibration workflow or your lab. FOr good prints, the only thing they need to do is to turn off their auto color correction, which with most labs you can do automatically in the online submission pages. I should tell you that you do have to judge prints under good lighting. Often these differences are simply caused by one day being sunny and the other overcast when you walk out on the parkinglot and take out your prints. This is not a real difference. Use a good high color rendering index lamp of high color temperature and you will see that they were the same. My local costcos is calibrated by drycreek photos every month and the profile hardly changes at all over time.
    >I don't know, Jao, maybe your point in photography is different, and you don't pay so much attention on colors. These things are subjective! Maybe you pay more attention on other components of photo. In my experience it takes lots of time to prepare a 40"x30" photo for print and then it takes more time and money to colormatch it.
    Actually my work is almost always about color. Perhaps I don't sweat it as much. I'd really like Lightroom to have some kind of soft proofing though showing how anal I am about color. I don't use costcos for prints larger than 12x18 as they don't do it locally, but I usually use smugmug's lab (EZprints) for the really large prints. They color manage for you and supply a profile that you can soft proof to if you want. They also appear to scale and sharpen the prints somehow. I've always had outstanding results from them and you can send back the images that you don't like at no cost, although I have never had to do that. I also use smugmug for galleries that clients can order from directly. They have always been very happy with the prints.
    >And I work in Windows, maybe your Mac does it better, maybe that's the point of my sad story. But Windows is my karma for many reasons.
    The point maybe, also, you print every time on the same printing hardware in Costco - that can explain it all.
    I have been happy with my costcos and with EZprints, but I doubt that it is much of an issue. As said, I don't use inkjets very often as they are so darn expensive and annoying to operate but I have never had much issue with bad prints. There is no reason why you could not get windows to behave better. The only thing that you need is to calibrate regularly. I have seen on this forum that windows tends to corrupt monitor profiles over time. The issue is always fixed by recalibrating regularly. Once every month should be plenty.

  • Turning off color managment in Canon Pro-10 printer driver

    Hi,
    I am using Lightroom 5 to print to a Canon Pro-10 printer. How do I disable the color management in the printer driver. I have selected the appropriate canon PRO-10 profile in Lightroom and it says to turn off color management in the printer driver dialogue box but I don't see where / what to do

    "my monitor has been calibrated"
    I hear this all the time.  It is the main reason I don't like all the calibration gadgets out there.  You need to "calibrate" your monitor to what your printer is printing.  Not some spec some gadget thinks it should be.
    You need to know what the bias of the printer is.  In this case Canon has put a reddish bias in it's printers to simulate a warm look.  This condition will not be accounted for in calibration software or monkeys.
    Get your brightness, contrast and grey-scale right and the rest will take care of itself.  You can do the necessary corrections in LR to make up for, or leave as is, the warm tone from the printer.
    BTW, you should be working in AdobeRGB or higher.  Factoid, you can not get every color to match.  This is not possibile.  You are dealing with two completely different mediums.  Light and dyes.  Adjusting any color effects other colors as well.
    EOS 1Ds Mk III, EOS 1D Mk IV, EF 50mm f1.2 L, EF 24-70mm f2.8 L,
    EF 85mm f1.2 L II USM, EF 70-200mm f2.8 L IS II,
    Sigma 120-300mm f2.8 EX APO, Photoshop CS6, ACR 9, Lightroom 6

  • Print Color Management Problem w. Photoshop Elements and Tiger/Leopard

    Has anyone tried printing with ICC profiles through Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac? Apparently, it does not work on Tiger nor Leopard? My prints look very dark and over-saturated.
    The Datacolor folks, who make the Spyder3 calibrators I'm using, say my prints look like they are being "double color managed," possibly once by PSE and once by the printer driver (even though it's turned off).
    Over at the Adobe Forums some say it's a problem with Leopard. I'm not so sure, because I found that printing color management works fine on a Mac with Photoshop Elements 4.01 and Tiger. Any comments? Thanks.

    Aha! Got it. Adobe has confirmed that the problem is on their end. PSE 6 is double color managing the images. Here's what one user got in reply from Adobe on the subject. There are two separate answers:
    Thank you for contacting Adobe Technical Support.
    After consulting with my colleagues about the issue you raised, I can let you know the following:
    The issue is both on our as well as the driver software side and the workaround we have given is the best available at this time. This issue is affecting all printers, not just Epson or Canon.
    The soft proofing effect that you are seeing in the print preview is indeed an attempt at soft proofing. However since Photoshop Elements managed prints are incorrectly double colour managed it is not as useful as it was initially designed.
    As to the exact details of why this occurred, we have no official information.
    We believe that this will resolve the issues you are experiencing, however, should the reply not help solve the problem, please contact us again, quoting the case number given above, and we will re-open the case.
    Answer # 2
    We have had word back from our engineers regarding your issue.
    The Photoshop Elements team are aware of the problem and are working with Apple and the printer manufacturers to get this to work correctly. In the meantime, the only workaround is to switch off colour management in Photoshop Elements and let the printer handle the colour management.
    Unfortunately we can not make an estimation as to when a fix will be provided. We will close the case for the time being as there really is nothing more we can do about this issue besides offering the suggested workaround. Closing this case does not mean that the research will stop however and the engineers are working on a solution to this.
    As the tech noted, let the printer handle the color instead. Tell PSE not to manage color so it is the step sending the data unaltered. When the print dialogue comes up, under the Color Correction heading, change the pull down menu to "ColorSync". In the menu below that, choose the correct profile for the paper you're using. If the Brightness menu is still active, look for any choice that allows you to turn it off. If none exists, leave it on Normal. If the options below that for Color Balance and Intensity are not grayed out, make sure they are at the center positions (no effect).
    These steps are the same as before, except you're doing them in reverse. Photoshop is doing nothing and the print driver is handling the ColorSync chores rather than the other way around.

  • How is "No Color Management" invoked in Aperture 3 compared to Aperture 2.

    I have 2 printers, a Canon IP8500 and a Hiti S420 dye-sub . Both printers were used succesfully with Aperture 2 and Leopard. Upgrading to Snow Leopard seemed to destroy previous colour management by Aperture and this was not cured, either by OSX version 10.6 or the introduction of Aperture 3. The arrival of !0.6 prompted Apple to include (in its OSX updates) Drivers for major Printer manufacturers, such as Canon and Epson, but not for Hiti and lesser known printers. Notwithstanding current practice of Drivers for the Canon being upgraded with upgrades to Apple OSX, print colour has not recovered its former high standard and prints display a dark reddish cast, which is correctable only by wasteful trial and error gamma adjustments. The Hiti displays the same problems and I have to conclude that two management profiles, Apple's and the printer's, are being applied to the output print.
    In Photoshop, print setting includes the ability to invoke "No color Management" and one can of course shell out from Aperture to an outside editor such as Photoshop, but what a pain! And, anyway, the colour is still somewhat out of balance, suggesting that 10.6 was not the milestone it was cracked up to be.
    Questions to the Aperture Team at Apple's support have elicited extracts from the Manual as follows:
    Turning Off Color Management in Your Printer
    For best results, you should turn off color management in your printer - How is not explained - when printing an image using Aperture. By default, most printers are set to convert the image to the printer’s color space. However, Aperture is designed to perform this conversion internally. Each printer manufacturer creates its own Print dialog. This means the setting for turning off color management in your printer varies depending upon the manufacturer of your printer and the printer model.
    Note: If you have multiple printers connected to your computer, you should create a print preset and turn off color management for each printer.
    To turn off color management for your printer
    Refer to the owner’s manual that came with your printer.
    Due to "Each printer manufacturer creates its own Print dialog." I have no insight what dialog you should use to prevent your Printer to double up an additional Profile.
    This does not actually advance my case. 1) Apple provide the Driver for Canon 2) There is no instruction how to create a Print Preset, nor what it should contain 3) There is no explanation of how to invoke controls, as in Aperture 2.

    Creating and Modifying Print Presets
    The above link is to a section of the User Manual.
    (Added)
    There are also Print Presets for your printer (printing from Aperture goes through two dialogs -- one of Aperture's, and one from your printer).  Usually, you can change settings and then select something like "Save as new Preset" from the drop-down Preset selector.
    Message was edited by: Kirby Krieger

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