Illustrator Colour Management Bug

Hello,
When I load in a CSF in illustrator CS 5.5 whose "CMYK profile" is not installed on a Mac, Illustrator Changes the CMYK profile to something else without changing the "settings" pull down menu to "custom...".
When i do the same in InDesign & Photoshop, the correct profiles are used as (i'm assuming) they are contained within the CSF file itself?
This means that i can have synchronized colour settings with totally inconsistent results because the ICC profiles are different from Mac to Mac & CS app to CS app etc.
Can you please fix this to work the same as Photoshop and InDesign?
Thanks!
Matt

The feature was browser independent. It even worked in IE < 9 which had never heard of color management. If I understand it correctly FlashPlayer gets the current primary display profile from the system not the browser and works with it. The browser independence was the most innovative part of this.
Anyway, whether color management works in Flash Player today or not is somehow intertwined with the wmode in use. Only wmode="window" works anymore. "opaque", "transparent", "gpu" and "direct" always give the stage.colorCorrectionSupport: unsupported status. Chrome's built in Flash player always gives that, too which makes sense considering what I wrote above. I have tested this on OS X, Win XP and Win7 64-bit today. On the latter I could not get it to work at all - might accessing the system's display profile be different on 64 bit windows or could it be a problem of having multiple screens on that machine? For testing I used the same ICC v2 display profile on all systems. I am very confident that in the past this worked with wmode="opaque" which I need to allow other things like lightboxes to be displayed above Flash elements.
The example http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/quickstart/color_correction_as3.html also uses wmode="opaque" so it fails today. Publishing the downlodable source files and viewing them with wmode="window" makes the feature work again. Could your team please fix this for the other wmodes - especially "opaque"?

Similar Messages

Flash Colour Management Bug?

Can anyone get the Flash application in the following link to return anything other than "Color Correction is not supported."
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/quickstart/color_correction_as3.html
Does this mean that Colour management is Broken in Flash Player?
I have tried a bunch of browsers, Windows and Mac operating systems and tried using several different display profiles but cannot get this to return the correct value...
I have also configured my firefox about:config with the correct profile path (trying several different profiles)...
am i missing something?
Thanks!

The feature was browser independent. It even worked in IE < 9 which had never heard of color management. If I understand it correctly FlashPlayer gets the current primary display profile from the system not the browser and works with it. The browser independence was the most innovative part of this.
Anyway, whether color management works in Flash Player today or not is somehow intertwined with the wmode in use. Only wmode="window" works anymore. "opaque", "transparent", "gpu" and "direct" always give the stage.colorCorrectionSupport: unsupported status. Chrome's built in Flash player always gives that, too which makes sense considering what I wrote above. I have tested this on OS X, Win XP and Win7 64-bit today. On the latter I could not get it to work at all - might accessing the system's display profile be different on 64 bit windows or could it be a problem of having multiple screens on that machine? For testing I used the same ICC v2 display profile on all systems. I am very confident that in the past this worked with wmode="opaque" which I need to allow other things like lightboxes to be displayed above Flash elements.
The example http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/quickstart/color_correction_as3.html also uses wmode="opaque" so it fails today. Publishing the downlodable source files and viewing them with wmode="window" makes the feature work again. Could your team please fix this for the other wmodes - especially "opaque"?

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

Pls help - colour management suite does not activate

Have the following problem with the bridge colour management properties opening:-
am in Bridge CS4-
inside dropdown menu "creative suite-colour management"
photoshop and illustrator are installed and in use
I cannot open this menu section as I get the following error code:-
This is my translation of the german as I have a german system - suite only possible when one of these programs have been started and in use.
So I cannot start this programm section, pls let me know what I can do. Both my programs ahve been started and have been used more than once.
Thks for the help, the adobe people cannot help me

Hi Omke,
Tryed both, start up scripts for AI and PS are activated and I also tryed to
refresh teh preferences as explained below....
Seams to be a bigger probleme.
Thanks Charles
Am 19.05.2009 18:49 Uhr schrieb "Omke Oudeman" unter <[email protected]>:
do you have both the start up scripts checked for AI and PS in the Bridge
preferences.
And have you already tried to restart Bridge holding down option key to
refresh the preferences?
>

Colour management warning for dual display users

For those of you who require a colour managed workflow and have more than one display, be very careful in Mountain Lion. It appears to have a bizarre bug where images loaded and shown on the primary display (e.g. in Preview) are initially rendered with the colour profile from the secondary display, or something along those lines. Dragging the display window to the secondary display and back again sorts things out. I've filed a bug report.
If your two (or more) monitors have the same colour profile, you won't have a problem. The only workaround I can see is to set your least important display(s) to all have the same profile as your (probably calibrated, if these things matter to you) primary display, at least until (if?) the bug gets fixed.
If you want to see it for yourself, set your two displays to differing profiles - e.g. NTSC (1953) on the primary and Wide Gamut RGB on the secondary. Then load an image into Preview - something with lots of shades of red "works" well for the colour profiles mentioned. Take a screenshot of the Preview window as a reference. Move the window to the secondary display; note the colour shift as it gets re-rendered. Now drag it back to the primary display. It'll look quite different compared to the screenshot you took earlier, despite the fact it's the same image being shown by the same application on the same display in the same window... All you did was drag the window between two monitors and back again.
It doesn't seem to matter if the image in question has a colour profile embedded in it or not. When comparing with your screenshot, feel free to drag the screenshot between the monitors too - after all, it'll be suffering the same rendering bug! You'll still see a different result; in fact it may even be magnified by the accumulated rendering errors.
Preview isn't the only application affected; I've seen identical issues under harder to replicate circumstances in Safari, for example.
Given this fault and others I've seen with colour rendering in Lion, plus several new bugs found in Mountain Lion, I'm afraid that if a colour managed workflow is important to you - well - Snow Leopard or Windows...?! Ugh, what a mess

I've encountered many of the same woes with color management being a graphic designer, but here's my issue:
Have a 15" (Early 2011) Macbook Pro. It is turned on with me hooked up to my Dell U2410 and display open for a dual display configuration. The Dell is my primary monitor.
I then unplug my MBP to use it around the house. I go to plug it back into the Dell for my dual monitor. I notice that the color on the Dell looks good, but now the MBP has a very blue color temperature. Like moving from the preconfigured 'Color LCD' profile to 'sRGB' which definitely shifts to a blue color on the MBP.
I check the color profiles in System Settings and the Color profiles are correct. 'Dell U2410' for my Dell and 'Color LCD' for my MBP. But as I said, it's much bluer than standard. I try to change the color profiles around on the MBP and no matter which I select it's always the same color with no shifts I would expect to see.
Only solution I have found is to restart my computer. Upon restarting all is well again in the world.
It's pretty annoying having to restart my computer everytime I plug it back into my workstation with Dell and keyboard.
Related note: USB does not work when I plug things back and again have to restart to fix this.

Colour managment, printing from inkjet as apose to laser.

Hi All!
My problem with illustrator is about colour management. I used a laser print while I was on placement and now using my injet a home and now it doesn’t print out the right colour. I have a set of logos which I want in the company colours. I don’t want to change them manually for this reason.
I did a bit of research on colour management for instance RIP separations, acrobat distiller etc. I don’t really know where im going wrong. My computer is XP windows and I have the Adobe master suite collection.
I don’t know if the colours changing because of a printer change or whether it’s more connected to the actual illustrator program.
Have anyone got any helpful suggestions?
Helen

Every inkjet printer wants to see RGB colors. If you send an inkjet CMYK colors it's confused. It doesn't understand the CMYK data so it converts it to something it does understand - RGB. It then takes that RGB data and converts it for printing to CcMmYyK. This double-conversion can quite often result in color shifts.
This, combined with the fact that most inkjet printers don't have a RIP, yields less-than-great results on inkjets when printing from Illustrator in most cases.
By simply saving the file as a PDF (No need for Distiller) you use Acrobat as a software RIP. Then if you print the PDF from Acrobat to the inkjet you'll get more more accurate results.

Colour management

I have now CS5 on a ProMac and noticed the prints are not the same as in Photoshop CS2 outputting from Epson 3880 printer. Can some advise how to print from the file and not from the printer. Yes I have profiles for paper and ink.

Are you saying that selection of any profile other than "printer" automatically disables printer colour management?
Yes. I can't see your screenshots for some reason. But, you should see both Colorsync and Canon Color Matching greyed out, regardless of which one seems to be "on". Canon Colormatch should be on if you're using any of the Canon utilities such as DPP or Easy Photo Print. That's probably what the Canon rep was telling you. Go ahead and give it a try. I'm not sure exactly what you're printing to, but I assume if you want to turn off Printer color management, you know which profile you want to use, say, for printing to non-Canon paper or using a calibrated custom profile. Just select the profile in Aperture, and Color Management should be turned off at the printer as long as you see the options greyed out. Aperture is just reminding you to make sure it's turned off (actually when I try it with my IP5200 and Pro3800, I don't get the reminder- perhaps it's a bug).
The options are available in Preview because Preview can't color manage.
Hope this helps.

Colour management issues! help!!!

Hi,
I have just bought a new printer. an Epson 1430 artisan. And Illustrator won't let me print anything it comes up with an error about colour management being inconsistent.
Just wondering how I can fix this? I need this for my home business and need to use it ASAP.
Thank you

The monitor calibration becomes important when what you see on the screen does not match what you see in your prints. What system are you using PC or Mac? Your monitor may have some controls for such things as brightness. Check the manual to see how you can achieve a fairly decent brightness level ( depending on the screen itself ). Look for the monitor control panel on your computer and see if you can find "Display Preferences > Calibrate". If you have it there are several adjustments that can be made, including "White Point". As I previously mentioned, the Epson 1430 Artisan has a User's Guide that shows you how to access advanced settings in the Print dialogues. That printer, along with many others, is a photographic printer that can achieve a decent color gamut. You have to do some reading and some experiments to establish what works for your particular print application(s). You almost surely are not limited to photography because you printed using Illustrator. In Illustrator, you may want to match colors more closely than you would in a photographic environment like Photoshop. You have told us what type of business and/or what type of printing you do on a daily basis. Just that colors do not match from what look great on screen to what looks like crap in prints. Color management is a very sophisticate and complex issue that is not quite addressed properly by the average consumer. But, ask any professional photographer and they can rattle off their settings in a heartbeat. Open up Illustrator's Color Settings > Advanced dialogue and take a look at some of the work spaces you have to choose from. Look at things like "Rendering Intent" and "Black Point Compensation". I'm a graphic designer. I select and maintain ( in Illustrator ) Rendering Intent = Relative Colorimetric. I have "Black Point Compensation" selected or "ON". My RGB workspace is Adobe RGB; CMYK workspace is US Sheetfed Coated ( SWOP ) v2. My document color space is always CMYK. See if you get some better results using them. By the way, most, if not all, monitors are sold with a White point and brightness too high for Illustrator work.

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?

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)...

Preview: Colour management/soft proofing?

I've finally had it with Acrobat (it's slow, buggy, argghh) and would like to use Preview as my main PDF viewer. I like the colour management settings in Acrobat and found the colour rendition faithful. I use it to soft proof files for press printing.
Is there any colour management settings in Preview?
It would be nice to know that what I'm seeing is representative of the file's colours.
Cheers, Lee.

You should only have to embed the profile used in Illustrator. It should be easy to check if it works. Save an identical PDF image out of Illustrator and Photoshop so you have both a vector and raster images to compare. Save one with a profile embedded and one without for each image. View both of them in Preview. At the same time, open them in Acrobat. Does the color look the same in one or the other? Also, what version of Acrobat are you using? Version 7 is much faster at loading and display than 6.

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.

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.

How do i turn off colour management in photoshop cc

i cannot make any sense of the 'help' on being able to see any display which allows me to turn off colour management in photoshop cc or in lightroom 5 when using my Mac 10.9.3

Good day!
What exactly do you mean?
Regards,
Pfaffenbichler

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.

Illustrator Colour Management Bug

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