Colour management in Indesign

I have CS3, and i just bought a Epson SPR2880.
I tried to print out something, but the colours are all messed up (to dark etc.)
In Indesign, i cant configure alot about my printer, only in photoshop.
And when i make a PDF to print it via acrobat, then the fonts look not very fine.
Thank you very much for your help

Your cinema display should be just fine. Do you have a colorimeter for calibating and profiling that? THat would be the first step in a color-managed workflow. If the monitor doesn't accurately represent the numbers in the file, you can't really look at a print and say "this is wrong" because you don't actually know what's right.
Your canned profiles for the various papers may be good enough -- give them a try -- but there are services that will make a custom profile for you for a fee.
But wasDYP has given you the best information about what's going on currently on your system. This was a big problem for many users.

Similar Messages

Colour Management from Indesign

How do I colour manage from IDesign to improve my laser copier output accuracy?

First, you need an accurate color profile for the printer ( and laser printers basically need recalibrating every day for really accurate color -- they're sensitve to things like temperature and humididy, and color can change thoughout the day, or even during a long print run), and then you need to turn off color management in the printer control panel, and finally, specify the correct output profile as the destination in the print dialog.

InDesign drops Colour Management Policies

We have an issue where Indesign stops using the colour management policies, we are using Ask when opening on mismatch profiles, missing profiles and pasting.
This works fine for a while, opening 3 or 4 documents but after that InDesign stops asking. A restart of InDesign makes it work again for a while and then it repeats.
We are experiencing this issue in both InDesign CS 5.5 and CS 6
Any suggestions to fix this will be most appreciated.

It seems that doing a backup on the Workspace file and then throwing the whole language folder away and then put the workspace file in place again works better. The reports from production since we tried this has been positive.
We do only use one third party plugin, this plug creates a preview of the InDesign file when saved and is used to show InDesign documents OnLine in our mediabanks. ( Norhplains Xinet) We have had this issue long before we invested in the Xinet system.

Colour Management - who does what - Some thoughts now the smoke is clearing

First up, thanks very much to everyone who contributed their ideas and expertise to my recent query here, when I was seeking help for a problem with colour management issues when printing a magazine I edit. I have a ton of suggestions to work through and study but the smoke is slowly clearing and it raises some interesting points which I think are worth recounting.
First of all, I have been editing short run magazines now for 25 years, at first part time and later on a professional contract basis. I am not a trained graphic designer nor a trained printer. I did start out training as a graphic designer, many years ago but gave it up for a career in IT (as a networking specialist). That was full time until 10 years ago, although I did some freelance writing and editing in my spare time.
And yes, I did start originally with scissors and cut and paste, and moved on through black and white with spot colour and Pagemaker software to full colour and InDesign today. One thing which may be different about my experience to most of yours is that I am a PC user and always have been. All my editing and graphics work has always been done on a PC - Pagemaker was our DTP package of choice for a long time and we supplemented this with Corel-Draw (which has a range of graphics handling options). All my software is legal and I always register it and keep it up to date. I have used the same graphic designer for quite a few years now and whenever we upgrade our software he goes and gets trained on the latest release.
Around 10 years ago I was offered the chance to edit a specialist short run magazine (not the current one). This was a chance I took and gave up the day job and became a full time freelance. Editing is not my main or only source of income. I am also a freelance writer and photographer and heritage consultant and I have a specialist image library.   I sell my own sell my work - articles and pictures - to the national and local press. I also write books (non fiction) on commission. The magazine editing is really an extension of my interest in historic landscapes. I have never had any complaints, or problems, with the freelance work, photos and archived images I sell. Clients include national newspapers here in the UK, national magazine groups and my books are available in national bookstore chains. I supply my work digitally, naturally, and it includes photos I have taken myself and items which I have scanned into my library of historical images and store on line. No reported colour management issues there.
I have always enjoyed a good relationship with my publishers and printers because I seek to be as professional as possible, which means delivering my stuff on time, to the required standard so that minimum intervention is required from them. This does assume that I have a clear brief from them on what they need from me.
Recently this approach has not been enough to avoid colour management issues with the short run magazine I currently edit. I have been wondering when and where things went astray and date it back to the upgrade to InDesign two years ago. However it may have its roots in my earlier decision to use PCs not Macs for my work.
Until 4 years ago I had used the same printers for magazine editing for many years. They were a well respected firm specialising in short run magazines. They were not far from where I live and work and if there was a problem I would go over and discuss it with them. They were happy, and competent, to handle Pagemaker files generated on a PC and convert my rgb images to cmyk if there was any concern about the colour balance. On a few occasions I paid them to scan a photo for me. However 4 years ago the owner decided to retire and shut up shop. I needed to find a new printers and it had to be someone who specialised in short run magazines and could meet the budget of the charity I edit for. Also someone who could handle copy generated using Pagemaker running on a PC. I chose a printers I had used briefly in the past where I knew some of the staff and was promised PC based Pagemaker would not be a problem. I even got this in writing. I started to send them proofs generated using Pagemaker v7 on my PC.
I soon found that although they had agreed they could handle Pagemaker on a PC in fact they had only a few PC based clients and were using a single ageing PC running Pagemaker to proof their work. In fact nearly all their jobs were Quark based. I was also told we had to supply CMYK images although not given any further requirement so I now did the conversions from rgb to CMYK using my PhotoPaint software. (There are quite a few settings in Corel for the conversion but there was no guidance by the printer on which to use so to be honest it did not occur to me that it might be a problem).
Now of course I understand that the drive to get customers to supply CMYK images was a Quark driven requirement back in the late 1990s. I did not and do not use Quark so knew nothing for this. I did have some early colour problems and font incompatibilities with the new printers and was pressured by their senior Graphic Designer (who designed for their own contract clients) to upgrade to InDesign and provide them with a .pdf, which I was assured would solve all my problems. The .pdf would be the same as the final printed magazine because "it would not require any further intervention by the printers".
I expect you are collectively throwing up your hands in horror at this point, but I think he was speaking genuinely. The creation of a .pdf using InDesign, is widely promoted as the ultimate answer to all printing issues.   I have encountered it recently with a lot of printers' salesmen and my friend, who edits a learned journal, has just been told the same thing by her printers, to get her to upgrade to ID. Incidentally she also uses a PC.
So we upgraded our design process in house to InDesign and our graphic designer went on a course, two courses in fact. When we came to produce our first .pdf using ID, the printers' Senior Graphic designer came on the phone and talked our designer through the ID Export function. I think he may at that time have told him to create a preset profile with MPC and the defaults, but to be honest I don't recall. We were never sent anything in writing about what settings we needed to match theirs. I continued to have intermittant colour management problems but put this down to my photos. Things came to head with the most recent issue where the colours were badly out on the cover, supplied by a press agency and taken by a professional photographer. The printers seemed to have little or no idea about possible causes.
Initially I thought that part of the underlying cause must lie in some mismatch between what I was sending the printers and what they expected to receive so I asked them to specify what I should send. All they said was use Profile preset as MPC setting and accept the defaults which accompany it.
So I came on here looking for a solution. A lot of people were keen to offer their own experience which I really appreciate. However the messages could be conflicting. Some of you suggested it was the underlying cover photo which was at fault, some that it was my monitor which needed better calibration.
Many of you here said that part of the problem, if not the whole problem, was the way I was generating my CMYKs for the printer and I should use Photoshop to do this. You also mentioned a number of possible colour management settings which I should try.
At times the advice seemed to change tack. There were suggestions that the colour management issues I had were nothing to do with the printers, that it was up to me not them. Quite a lot of you said I needed to be better informed about Colour Management issues. I agree, but I had never had any previously (maybe good luck, maybe good support from my previous printer) so I was not even aware that I needed to be better informed. Some of you mildly chastised me for not finding out more and doing more to manage my own colour management with the switch to ID. To which I can only say if I had needed to train up, I would have done. I did not realise I needed to. Nor was my designer aware of the issues as colour management was not really covered on his ID courses which were about typesetting and design.
Some of you even seemed to hint that unless I was prepared to use an expensive high end printer or effectively retrain as a print specialist or get my graphic designer to do so, then I probably shouldn't be in the magazine editing game at all. OK maybe that is a bit harsh but you get the drift.
The fact is that printing is much more accessible these days to all sorts of people and in particular to people with PCs. My brother lives in a large village in an isolated area and produces a village magazine which has been a great success. It is in black and white with spot colour but he would like to move to an all colour issue. He is a bit nervous of the colour management issues as he has no experience of graphic design and is his own designer using a low end entry level design package. He too uses a PC. The printers reps all tell him the same thing they tell me, that all he needs to supply is a .pdf using InDesign.
Somewhere I feel a black hole has developed, maybe back in the 1990s with Quark 4.11. A lot of printers standardised on that, and set up a work flow and prepress dependent on CMYK images as provided by the clients. They assumed the the clients would doing their own colour management. This approach also assumes everyone is using Quark on a Mac with the full range of Adobe software. When it became possible to generate .pdfs using InDesign, this was held out to users as the Holy Grail of magazine printing, even though their workflows and prepress were still based on Quark 4.11 principles. Any underlying colour management issues the clients now have to tackle themselves.
So now we have the situation in which I find myself, having to learn from scratch a good deal about colour management issues so that I can tell the printers what is needed for my magazine. Meanwhile all the printing salesmen, the ones I encounter anyway, are still busy pushing the InDesign to .pdf as the "be all and end all" solution. Some re-education is needed for all parties I think.

I am glad to see that the sun is peeping through the clouds.
I apologise for my Aussie-style straight talk earlier, but as I said before it was not directed personally at you but in the direction of others whom you epitomize, repeating a conversation I have had many times over the last 10 years or so where respectable, well-meaning photographers, designers and other contributors refuse to accept that colour management is being thrust upon them.
It is a simple fact of life, there is this 'new' thing that has butted into the very root of our trades and changed the most basic principles of printing and photography. We expect that this kind of thing does not happen but the industry we now work in is not the same one we trained in twenty years ago.
Many printers are still struggling with the same conflict, so many tradespeople cannot accept this change.
This is exacerbated by the fact that colour management is so complicated to learn and implement and confounded by the fact that the default settings and a clumsy workflow often yield acceptable results with incorrect, generic settings, hence the old 'use InDesign and make a PDF and it will be ok' route.
When the chain of colour management includes the photographer, the photographer's client, the designer, the other designer maybe, the prepress person, and the platemaker, and a single incorrect click by any one of those can kill the CM it is not surprising that in the end when someone is looking back to see where it fell over they usually never find out.....   They will meet someone who says ' I never touched it, I simply opened the file and scaled it and closed it'. And that person will be a reputable photographer or designer (and CLIENT) who has no idea they just broke it. So what do we do? We go with the generic setting that seems to yield adequate results therefore avoiding the confrontation.
You need to understand the situation of the printer who took his business through the 'early' days of colour management, we had all kinds of very reputable sources supplying incorrect files, we did not have the expertise yet to be able to address the entire workflow, it would have meant training photographers and designers all through the best design houses and national institutions, because they blamed the printer. Only in the last few years have I seen these people coming around to the fact that they bear responsibility for implementing their own cm and maintaining it through their own work.
Sadly, many high end sources are still not there, and I mean HIGH end! Probably the ones that don't even visit this forum because they want to keep blaming the printer... They tend to live with the poor quality reproductions and just pull up the worst ones and fiddle with those and try to avoid the 'elephant in the room'.
I am sorry to say that it was not practical for a printer to reject mismanaged files for fear of losing clients who would happily accept less than perfect results in order to avoid the painful truth that was being told to them. The best thing we could do was to gently make those clients aware that their workflow was imperfect and hope to show them how we could help... Many print shops do not have someone knowledgeable enough or patient enough to do this, or the boss does not understand the issue either and tries to work around it to keep his jobs flowing in the expectation that all those experts in the chain will eventually tame the thing.
The many experts on this holy forum are waaaaayyyy ahead of the printing industry in general and photographers and designers in general in their understanding of colour management workflow. I have seen first hand how reputable local industry people and trainers alike are spreading misinformation and bad techniques, when I discovered these forums back in about 2002 I found that they opened up a whole new galaxy of knowledge and facts that actually worked and made sense, unlike what I had been told locally.... This forum taught me what the Adobe text books did not, the Tech' teachers did not, local 'experts' did not!
I tell all interested people to join these forums and learn to discriminate between the good and bad information.

A Colour Management tutorial from an amateur

Archiving at the end of a long project I came across a document I assembled at the start when I wanted to teach myself about colour management. I spent several weeks reading, experimenting and putting together these notes, but it all came to nought. To quote from the notes:
…I chose not to use colour management when printing my books on a Xerox iGen3. I converted the InDesign files to PDF with all colour management turned off, and asked the printer to print ‘direct’. The iGen RIP converted RGB images to CMYK, and CMYK images were printed as per the colour numbers. Using certain colour settings for my monitor, and for Photoshop and InDesign, I was able to obtain a very close match between what was on screen and what was on paper without the need for profiles…
I've asked a fair few questions here over the years, and this forum has been a great help, but I rarely offer anything in return. Well, here's a little something that some people might find useful. A mob of information about colour management, collated from various sources with my tuppence worth here and there to make it flow. It was put together before my InDesign days when I used Pages, so forgive the mediocre layout.
Colour Management (450k) can be downloaded here: http://www.mediafire.com/?86edp6742ac6zlv (If Peter Spier is reading this: Peter, that's a hot link now; I've upgraded my Mediafire account so there are no more banners).
If anyone visits here in the future and that link doesn't work (which will happen if I upload a new version), try this one, a link to the folder: http://www.mediafire.com/?an9n0o36nymwv
Please let me know if there are any gross errors in the PDF and I'll fire up Pages and correct them.

geoffseeley, Welcome to the discussion area!
1) amber light keeps flashing but internet works - is this a problem?
I believe that indicates that you do not have wireless encryption enabled. If you enabled wireless encryption, the light should turn green.
3) how does iTunes work through the extreme box? am i supposed to plug my home cinema into the extreme box somehow?
The AirPort Extreme base station (AEBS) has no special features to support video/audio directly. iTunes has nothing to do with the AEBS.
The AirPort Express (AX) has an audio out port for streaming music from iTunes.

Colour management issues

Hi there
I have a problem with the way InDesign displays the colours of photographs. I have created a book which contains lots of photos. The oringinal RAW images were exported from LR4 as ProPhoto RGB files, opened in PhotoShop CS5 (working spaces: ProPhotoRGB and Blurb icc profile). The files were then converted to the Blurb (an online book publisher) CMYK profile and saved as new files.
The InDesign document has the same colour management setting as I used for PS CS5 i.e. RGB colour space: ProPhoto and CMYK colour space: Blurb.icc profile. When I place the files into the document they become noticeably over saturated. When the book was finally printed the images were not the same as the InDesign document or print ready PDF. BUT were a perfect match with the CMYK images opened in PhotoShop. I'm using a calibriated Eizo monitor, so should not be any issues there.
Has anyone experienced this issue before or can anyone provide a possible explanation?. Any advice gratefully received.
thanks
Jan

When I place the files into the document they become noticeably over saturated.
Select the image and check the ICC profile in the Links panel link info. Make sure its profile is the expected blurb CMYK profile. If it's Document CMYK check the document CMYK profile in Edit>Assign Profiles... and make sure it is the Blurb profile. The assigned profile can be different than the Color Setting's working space profile.

Colour Management & Dot Gain

Im looking for clarification on how i should approach colour management settings when my rip compensates for dot gain for the different paper types.
I am sending litho plates out via a pdf based workflow utilising a harlequin rip.
My questions..
If my workflow (harlequin rip) is calibrated to adjust for dot gain depending on different paper types ( FOGRA Coated/Uncoated) should i then just be sending files to it that are not tagged with profiles/colourmanaged to prevent multiple conversions?
Should i colour manage pre-rip and allow for dot gain (2 conversions) or is only 1 or the other necessary?
For example...
1. I am assigning a FOGRA coated profile to my images in photshop
2. Then placing my image in my indesign layout and exporting it to pdf using FOGRA coated settings
3. pdf is then dropped into the workflow
4. pdf is ripped and dot gain allowance is applied
5. Plate is then outputted
Any thoughts please
Andy barrington
www.barringtonprint.com

I'd want to see your InDesign Color Settings. The RIP should have a choice in its calibration methods whether to honor .icc profiles and application settings. So, hypothetically if you feed it a PDF job that includes profiles and honors existing application color setups ( PS, Ai, ID, etc., etc. ) and the RIP is set to honor app color settings and profiles, then no duplication of dot gain adjustment will take place. If the RIP is set to not honoring app color settings and/or profiles, then it will adjust for dot gain. Look into your RIP's calibration and whether or not it honors application color settings and .icc profiles. Should it somehow apply a second round of dot gain adjustments, then deselect dot gain adjustments in your desktop applications. You only need dot gain adjustment done once.

Colour management for dummies please

I have seen many discusions about ink limits and colour profiles but can anyone offer a dummies' guide?!
I use CS5 and in Bridge it is set to Europe Prepress 3. My understanding is that this should take care of things but when I make a PDF of my job and preflight it in Acrobat I get an ink limit warning. The profile of the placed Photoshop file (which is CMYK) is FOGRA39, as is the InDesign file (obviously, as this is defined by Prepress 3). So if I make a PDF X-1a shouldn't all that control the ink limit?
I have found that if I switch the Photoshop file to RGB then it works fine - I can see in InDesign separations preview that ink is OK, and the PDF preflights OK in Acrobat. So that tells me that the ink control happens when a conversion is required. The general wisdom seems to be that for CMYK print, files linked to InDesign should be CMYK not RGB (though to me, RGB seems to work fine as it gets converted at PDF stage), so how do I limit the ink if the file is CMYK? Should my Photoshop file not be colour managed perhaps? I read in a forum that Photoshop restricts the ink limit according to the colour profile being used, but that doesn't seem to be happening for me.*
I called Adobe and their best shot was that I should switch CS5 to North America Prepress, and use the 'High Quality Print' PDF preset. Well maybe I'm taking it too literally, but I'm In England and have a job which is about to be printed in Hungary! And also, this yields a US Web Coated (SWOP) v2 profile which doesn't seem right as I will be printing sheetfed.
I would appreciate it if someone could straighten me out.
* I tested this by switching the Photoshop file to Web Coated FOGRA28 and the colour values did change to allow for a lower ink limit, so maybe there's something in that. So why doesn't FOGRA39 do it? With the colour set to FOGRA39 Photoshop happily accepts a nice black blob coloured as 100% each of C,M,Y and K.
Sorry if this is a bit long but it seems like a useful discussion for Colour management newbies.

I read in a forum that Photoshop restricts the ink limit according to the colour profile being used, but that doesn't seem to be happening for me.*
Total Ink limit is a parameter of a CMYK profile—so the limit won't be exceeded when you make a color conversion from any other color space into that profile's color space, i.e AdobeRGB>FOGRA39, or US Sheetfed Coated>FOGRA39. However, once the file is converted to CMYK there's nothing stopping me from exceeding the limit via a color correction. For example, I could convert a PS file filled with 0|0|0 RGB to FOGRA39 CMYK and the ink limit would not exceed the 330% defined in the FOGRA39 profile, but as you noted I could also fill the resulting CMYK file with 100|100|100|100 and exceed the 330% limit.
Also, there's nothing stopping me from assigning the FOGRA39 profile to any CMYK file. In that case there's no color conversion—I could make a new SWOP Coated CMYK file, fill it with 100|100|100|100, assign FOGRA39, and the fill would still have 400% total ink.
Total ink is only limited via a color conversion
The general wisdom seems to be that for CMYK print, files linked to InDesign should be CMYK not RGB (though to me, RGB seems to work fine as it gets converted at PDF stage)
The general wisdom is actually old conventional wisdom, there's nothing wrong with making the conversion from RGB to CMYK when you export—the resulting CMYK values will be no different than the ones you would get out of PS assuming the source and destination profiles, and rendering intents are the same. The no RGB rule is a hangover from when you couldn't make color managed color conversions inside a page layout program.

Colour management profile for LaserJet 2200 printer?

I am reasonably familiar with the basics of colour management. My monitor is calibrated, I use Epson's standard colour profiles for my Epson 3800 inkjet printer and what I see on the screen is more or less what I get out of this printer. However, I am having less success in controlling the printing on my HP LaserJet 2200 of monochrome images contained within an InDesign CS4 document.
The obvious answer would appear to be to use a purpose-designed printer profile for the HP LaserJet 2200 but, so far, I have failed to find a source for such a profile. Can anyone help?
David

When you save a grayscale (if you save in grayscale mode and aren't just saving a completely desaturated or otherwise made to look like grayscale RGB or CMYK mode image) in Photoshop you should be saving with a grayscale profile like Dot Gain 30% of Gamma 2.2 or something else from the list. These profiles are designed to match printing conditions of various types or different types of monitors (and I'm not going to go into a lot of detail here).
Photoshop understands grayscale profiles, InDesign does not, so it looks at the numbers and says these are all black, so they belong in the black channel, and I'll put them in that channel in the current document CMYK working space. Different CMYK profiles behave a little differently when you print, but to be perfectly honest, I've never really investigated the consequences of choosing one over another for printing grayscale, because all the information is already black and I don't think assigning a new profile would change anything (though CONVERTING to a new profile might well take your grayscale and make it a 4-color image).
Dot gain is the amount of "spread" that happens to each halftone spot wne the ink is absorbed by the paper, and the number is usually defined as the amount of gain for a 50% dot. Dot gain causes images to print darker. For a classic illustration, think of using an eyedropper to drop a single drop of ink onto a sheet of tissue paper, and you'll get the idea. Coated papers usually have better ink "holdout" (they are less absorbent) than uncoated papers, and thus lower dot gain.
Laser printers don't use liquid ink, but they do have gain. The toner is melted and gets absorbed into the surface of the paper as it goes through the fuser which is what keeps it from falling off as a pile of dust.
So how do the prints look now, and what are the settings you are using in the print dialog?

Colour management between creative suite and iPad/iOS

Does anyone have any insight into colour management for imagery between creative suite and iPad/iOS. ? i.e using the appropriate Proof set up across indesign/photoshop/bridge to as close as you can mimic what you will see on the iPad?
We're seeing quite radical differences from what we shoot in our studio (which is consistent on all our screens across the studio) to what we see on uploading to iPad. How can we best mimic the iPad colour space?

This post in the Ideas forum might be of some use.

CS4 Colour Management question(s)

Ok, here goes...
My team of designers create adverts in InDesign that are to appear in either a newspaper OR a glossy magazine.
We employ an Ad Tracking system that provides a blank InDesign template for them to work from.
The Ad Tracking system knows if the advert is for newsprint or glossy and provides a template where the CMYK Working Space is either ISOnewspaper26v4 or ISO Coated v2 300% (ECI) respectively.
We only ever place CMYK images into these adverts. These images have been converted in Photoshop using the same ICC Profiles (depending on destination) as above. Profiles are not included in the images.
We then output a PDF with "No Colour Conversion" and "Don't Include Profiles" in the output settings.
We have been working this way for years but I would like to introduce an RGB workflow where we can place RGB images in InDesign and output a PDF that is not yet specifically for Newsprint or Glossy.
I don't want InDesign to convert to a profile but our Ad Tracking system can route this "generic" PDF through a system called Asura from One Vision that does the conversion to Newsprint or Glossy using the relevant output ICC Profile.
My questions...
1. Am I correct in thinking that the RGB and CMYK values of the placed images will not change in the PDF exported from InDesign?
2. How are placed images affected by the Working Space?
3. Does "Emulate Adobe InDesign 2.0 CMS Off" give a non-specific document?
I have watched both David Blatner's and Chris Murphy's titles on Colour Management on Lynda.com and thought I had a reasonable grasp of basic colour management until I came to think about changing workflow.
Any help would be greatly appeciated.
Thanks
Simon.

Thanks Rob, well explained.
Just a couple more questions if you don't mind...
How would you create an InDesign document with no profile assigned?
and
Does it matter if a document has a Glossy profile assigned and the exported PDF is then converted to Newsprint downstream? Is this just a case of the downstream conversion needing to know what profile was assigned to the document and the placed images?
Thanks again.
Simon.

Switch off printer colour management

Hello,
I am on a Mac Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and using IDCS5 to print to a Canon Pro 9500 printer.
When I get to the print dialog, I can only select colour handling by indesign. There is no option for colour managed by printer which is fine because I would prefer to have indesign manage the colours.
However when I go to printer settings dialog I cannot turn off the printer colour management. There are two radio buttons only in the colour matching section. One is canon colour matching and the other is Coloursync from which I can select from various colour profiles.
I can't figure out how to disable colour mangement from the printer driver.
Can someone help me with this please?
Jach

I can see what you are saying about objects with different profiles in one indesign document. But the output has to be just one profile - in my case my custom built profile for the type of paper and my inkjet printer.
So if my understanding is right - Indesign takes the number colours from the various objects in the document and convert them to numbers that my printer will use for a particular type of paper. To do this conversion indesign needs a recipe, and that recipe is in the form of my custum built profile.
However, what is happening so far, is that indesign is converting the colours using my profile but then the printer driver is also doing some form of conversion which is messing up the colours.
What I did try is select the right profile in the indesign print dialogue and then went to printer settings and chose colour sync and the same profile from the drop down list. I was hoping that selecting the same profile in both indesign and printer driver would result in preventing double profiling. However the results were bad.
I am not sure how choosing DocumentRGB is going to help. Because my colour setting across the adobe suite is ProPhoto RGB for the RGB settings.
If I go to the drop down menu for printer profile, one of the options I get is "DocumentRGB - ProPhotoRGB". Wouldn't this be wrong if some of the images in my document are sRGB or some other colour space?

Printing Colour Issues - colour management settings

Hi there
I've been having some serious printing problems recently when I print from InDesign CS5 and also from Acrobat when printing PDFs exported from InDesign.
All of the print out colours a wrong (such as Blacks printing as pink)
I have tried changing several settings, but nothing seems to be fixing it.
I've replaced all my inks and I can print fine when printing in other programs such as word, so its not an ink issue.
My printer is a Canon MP540
I'm using a Mac, on OS X Lion.
I think i'm using the default colour management settings, however could this possibly be the issue?- which settings might work?
I would REALLY APPRECIATE any help with this issue!
Many Thanks

if I look at the same image in the default 'Preview' on Mac, the
colours look different to what I see in PS
First, that would clearly indicate your image does not have an embedded profile, or Ps is being told to ignore the embedded profile — Ps is applying a different profile (or it may have been dinked around with in its Edit> Color Settings> More Options> Advanced Controls).
It is best for most people not to dink around with Color Settings> More Options...to get back a Default starting point, just select a preset like North American Prepress 2.
I know there are a million posts and articles on this complex subject
You only need one good article to grasp the basic issues.
The short answer is you are either missing something in scenario One, or you are hitting a bug.
When Photoshop setups a correct SourceSpace-to-PrintSpace Conversion the Epson will print your file faithfully if your Source Color is within print gamut and your Print Space reflects an accurate ICC profile to the specific printer-paper-ink you are printing to.
I would recommend testing with a known good file like the download Photodisc PDI test image (so bad files don't confuse the process)...

My problem is that after printing the first photo or picture, when I come to print a second, both the Colour Management and Epson Colour Controls are greyed out and showing No Colour Management

I have recently purchased a Mac computer (updated to Maverick) to go with my Epson Stylus Photo RX500 printer which has given excellent service with my old Windows computer. However, when trying to print pictures or photos via Photoshop Elements 11, the best results I can get are using the Colour Management and Epson Colour controls in the printing options box.
My problem is that after printing the first photo or picture, when I come to print a second, both the Colour Management and Epson Colour Controls are greyed out and showing No Colour Management, The only way I can reset the controls is to shut down the printer and computer and restart.
Could there may be a setting somewhere that I need to adjust please? I have been in touch with Epson and they say that the Epson Colour controls are part of the Photoshop Elements software but a post on the Adobe forum brought no results and I am unable to contact Adobe.
<Edited by Host>

Hello Garry. Thanks for the reply. I guess I should have used a different title from "How do I post a question?" That should come after trying to resolved the colour settings first. However, to answer your question, after experimenting with all the different settings in Photoshop Elements and Epson software, I now start with PSE11 Colour settings then click "no colour management" then after clicking Print, I choose "More Options/Colour Management/Colour Handling/Printer Manages Colour" then I choose "Page Setup/Layout/Colour Matching" which then shows Epson Colour Controls but I also choose "Layout/Colour Management" which then shows "Colour Controls/Mode" I then of course choose an Epson printer profile depending on the paper I am using. I get good results but as I said, the Colour Matching and Colour Controls are then greyed out. Hope that makes sense.

How do I fix colour picker to work across different colour-managed monitors?

Hey everyone!
I'm assuming this problem I'm having stems from having colour-calibrated monitors, but let me know if I'm wrong!
To preface, this is the setup I have:
Windows 7
3 monitors as follows, all have individual colour profiles calibrated using the Spyder 3
Cintiq 12WX
Dell U2410
Dell 2409WFP
Photoshop CS6 - Proofed with Monitor RGB, and tested with colour-managed and non-colour-managed documents
I usually do most of my work on the Cintiq 12WX, but pull the photoshop window to my main monitor to do large previews and some corrections. I noticed that the colour picker wouldn't pick colours consistently depending on the monitor the Photoshop window is on.
Here are some video examples:
This is how the colour picker works on my Dell U2410: http://screencast.com/t/lVevxk5Ihk
This is how it works on my Cintiq 12WX: http://screencast.com/t/tdREx4Xyhw9
Main Question
I know the Cintiq's video capture makes the picture look more saturated than the Dell's, but it actually looks fine physically, which is okay. But notice how the Cintiq's colour picker doesn't pick a matching colour. It was actually happening the opposite way for a while (Dell was off, Cintiq was fine), but it magically swapped while I was trying to figure out what was going on. Anyone know what's going on, and how I might fix it?
Thanks for *any* help!
Semi-related Question regarding Colour Management
Colour management has always been the elephant-in-the-room for me when I first tried to calibrate my monitors with a Spyder colourimeter years ago. My monitors looked great, but Photoshop's colours became unpredictable and I decided to abandon the idea of calibrating my monitors for years until recently. I decided to give it another chance and follow some tutorials and articles in an attempt to keep my colours consistent across Photoshop and web browsers, at least. I've been proofing against monitor colour and exporting for web without an attached profile to keep pictures looking good on web browsers. However, pictures exported as such will look horrible when uploaded to Facebook. Uploading pictures with an attached colour profile makes it look good on Facebook. This has forced me to export 2 versions of a picture, one with an attached colour profile and one without, each time I want to share it across different platform. Is there no way to fix this issue?
Pictures viewed in Windows Photo Viewer are also off-colour, but I think that's because it's not colour managed... but that's a lesser concern.

I think I've figured out the colour management stuff in the secondary question, but the weird eyedropper issue is still happening. Could just be a quirk from working on things across multiple monitors, but I'm hoping someone might know if this is a bug/artifact.
Going to lay out what I inferred from my experiments regarding colour management in case other noobs like me run into the same frustrations as I did. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong - the following are all based on observation.
General Explanation
A major source of my problems stem from my erroneous assumption that all browsers will use sRGB when rendering images. Apparently, most popular browsers today are colour-managed, and will use an image's embedded colour profile if it exists, and the monitor's colour profile if it doesn't. This was all well and good before I calibrated my monitors, because the profile attached to them by default were either sRGB or a monitor default that's close to it. While you can never guarantee consistency on other people's monitors, you can catch most cases by embedding a colour profile - even if it is sRGB. This forces colour-managed browsers to use sRGB to render your image, while non-colour-managed browsers will simply default to sRGB. sRGB seems to be the profile used by Windows Photo Viewer too, so images saved in other wider gamut colour spaces will look relatively drab when viewed in WPV versus a colour-managed browser.
Another key to figuring all this out was understanding how Profile Assignment and Conversion work, and the somewhat-related soft-proofing feature. Under Edit, you are given the option to either assign a colour profile to the image, or convert the image to another colour profile. Converting an image to a colour profile will replace the colour profile and perform colour compensations so that the image will look as physically close to the original as possible. Assigning a profile only replaces the colour profile but performs no compensations. The latter is simulated when soft-proofing (View > Proof Colors or ctrl/cmd-Y). I had followed bad advice and made the mistake of setting up my proofing to Monitor Color because this made images edited in Photoshop look identical when the same image is viewed in the browser, which was rendering my images with the Monitor's colour profile, which in turn stemmed from yet another bad advice I got against embedding profiles . This should formally answer Lundberg's bewilderment over my mention of soft-proofing against Monitor Colour.
Conclusion and Typical Workflow (aka TL;DR)
To begin, these are the settings I use:
Color Settings: I leave it default at North American General Purpose 2, but probably switch from sRGB to AdobeRGB or ProPhoto RGB so I can play in a wider gamut.
Proof Setup: I don't really care about this anymore because I do not soft-proof (ctrl/cmd-Y) in this new workflow.
Let's assume that I have a bunch of photographs I want to post online. RAWs usually come down in the AdobeRGB colour space - a nice, wide gamut that I'll keep while editing. Once I've made my edits, I save the source PSD to prep for export for web.
To export to web, I first Convert to the sRGB profile by going to Edit > Convert to Profile. I select sRGB as the destination space, and change the Intent to either Perceptual or Relative Colorimetric, depending on what looks best to me. This will convert the image to the sRGB colour space while trying to keep the colours as close to the original as possible, although some shift may occur to compensate for the narrower gamut. Next, go to Save for Web. The settings you'll use:
Embed Color Profile CHECKED
Convert to sRGB UNCHECKED (really doesn't matter since you're already in the sRGB colour space)
and Preview set to Internet Standard RGB (this is of no consequence - but it will give a preview of what the image will look like in the sRGB space)
That's it! While there might be a slight shift in colour when you converted from AdobeRGB to sRGB, everything from then on should stay consistent from Photoshop to the browser
Edit: Of course, if you'd like people to view your photos in glorious wide gamut in their colour-managed browsers, you can skip the conversion to sRGB and keep them in AdobeRGB. When Saving for Web, simply remember to Embed the Color Profile, DO NOT convert to sRGB, and set Preview to "Use Document Profile" to see what the image would look like when drawn with the embedded color profile

Colour management in Indesign

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