More color nasties

Question

First of all I LOVE the Aperture workflow. Taking photos from my camera (30D RAW) into the app is a breeze. Managing versions and making a roundtrip to Photoshop and back is smooth and easy. I love stacking, I love comparing images on a second screen (I have 2x 23-inch cinema displays); I love keywording and sorting, searching... makes my handling over 15,000 images very manageable and enjoyable. Every thing is nearly flawless... except:
I am really getting quite sick of dealing with color issues.
1: Sometimes my images look muddy with no detail in the shadows, sometimes they look fine. When viewing them on a second screen, the detail is there, then after a few seconds of 'loading', the detail is gone. This includes looking at the original RAW files without any adjustment. I haven't been able to pinpoint the issue, but RAW 2.0 seems to have helped a bit, although the color between RAW 1.1 and RAW 2 is quite different.
2: Onscreen proofing looks AWFUL; and for me it has always looked awful. I used to run Aperture 1/1.5 with a "Cinema HD" profile... later calibrated both my displays with a Huey Pro. Awful before, awful after. I am using Aperture 2 and have switched between the "Cinema HD" and a new Huey profile I made... still awful. I am using various profiles from my Canon IP9000 (Canon Pro9000 SP1-SP4; Canon Pro9000 PR1-PR3)and each one has it's own awfulness to it. Colors washed, shadows murky, etc... awful.
3: Why is printing from Aperture such a royal pain and why are good results, if you're ever lucky enough to get them, so hard to reproduce? Latest prints came out with the shadowy areas of a red leather couch having a distinct green hue. Same with a shadow from my subject's clothing on her skin... Same images printed from Photoshop: fine and crisp, beautiful shadows, no green. It's obviously not the printer.
There are numerous threads about people experiencing problems printing with Aperture: mostly about color, and some about borders on prints even when borderless printing is selected (another intermittent and mysterious problem that affects me, as well)...
Last year I bought the "Aperture 1.5 Book"; helped a lot with workflow; practically useless with regards to printing. That book recommended reading "Color Management in OS X" which I recently picked up, learned a bit about Gamut and ICC (most of which I knew already) but it was published in 2004 and the Leopard ColorSync utility lacks a dedicated 'Preference' pane which this book makes a great deal of reference to.
So, can anyone tell me what the deal is with Aperture and color? Why is it so difficult to get consistent results? Why don't the same issues occur in Photoshop or even Apple's iPhoto (printing from iPhoto seems to produce far superior results to Aperture and is a lot easier to manage, as well). I have spent $$ on decent software and hardware, bought a decent printer, read the books, spent a LOT of time in the support threads, etc... I know there are a lot of variables involved, but it shouldn't be THAT difficult to print from Aperture, should it?
here's what I'm using:
Aperture 2.0.1
Leopard 10.5.2
G5 quad 4 x 2.5GHz
8 GB RAM
2 x 23-inch Cinema HD displays
Huey Pro 1.5.0
but like I said, I have had many of the same problems in Tiger with Aperture 1/1.5

Answer 1

Hi Rich. Way to stick with it
I know the purpose of proofing is to give you somewhat of an idea of what the printed output will look like, however, I doubt the awfulness I kept referring to on screen is due to the printer limitations, as the same photos that will proof awfully, are quite capable of being printed faithfully (as experience from Photoshop and iPhoto can attest). The only time that the prints DO somewhat match the awful proofs (muddy, color casts especially in shadows, etc...) is when I print them from Aperture, but, again, from other applications the same photos will print much more faithfully.
The part to get your head around, is that the goal here isn't to make great looking prints--it's to make prints that match what you see on screen. Only when you know that what you see on screen is what's coming out of the printer can you make adjustments to the image--then when the image looks great on screen, it will look great off the printer. Note that you have to calibrate your monitor for any of this to work.
and in terms of the second : Printing
{quote:title=Eoin Kavanagh wrote:}That being said, where are you setting up this profile to use. What I mean by that is I presume you have set the colour option to none from the print settings only in the Aperture print dialogue box and set the correct ICC profile for the paper you are using later in the Colorsync Profile drop down menu on the main print dialogue. {quote}
This is another gripe I have... Why are there so many places to set printing preferences (and therefore, make a mistake)? Eoin, if I am understanding, you have suggested not using the Aperture print dialogue for choosing settings, while Janet below suggests the opposite: using Aperture's print dialogue and NOT the other one. I realize that you are both saying the same thing: set in ONE PLACE and not the other... the fact that it is possible to set it (and screw it up) in more than one place is not only confusing, but quite unnecessary. A very 'Microsoft' way of handling printing, don't you think?
LOL. It has a very Microsoft feel to it. There are way too many places to set this and mess it up. You are correct that you should select color management in one place, or your colors will be "double-managed". I believe that Eoin is mistaken about the right place to do this (and the Ap manual will back me on this).
I did a test to print from Aperture. The first time I set the Printer profile with Aperture, the second time I left it as "System Managed"
Here are the steps I followed:
1. select the photo
2. command+p (print) > Aperture's print window shows up
3. (ignoring any saved print settings that I have, here's what I would do next) choose my Pro9000
4. Clicked "Print Settings" > "Quality and Media" selected "Photo Paper Plus Glossy" and ticked "Printing a top-quality photo"
4a: checked out the "Color Options" pane, but there is nothing in there that lets you choose a profile (Color Mode drop down greyed out)
5. click "Save" ... (returned to Aperture print dialogue)
6. Choose paer size: 5x7 (borderless)
*note: border still shows in preview image
7. Orientation: best fit
8 ColorSync Profile: Canon Pro9000 PR3
9. left Black point Compensation Checked
10. Gamma 1.0 (unchanged)
11. Sharpen options both left at 0
12. Scale To: Fill Entire Page
13. Border Options: Width: 0 in
*note: border disappears from preview image
14. Click "Print"
*special note: if you try to go back to step 4 and click "Print Settings" a second time, Aperture 2.0 crashes
First note: make sure the paper that you're using matches the profile that you've selected. It has to be the exact paper, or all bets are off. I think the problem here might be the order in which you're choosing your settings. You might think that you'd do it in the order it's presented in the Aperture print dialogue, but that would be way too logical. Choose the Colorsync Profile first, then open the Print Settings. Now you should be able to turn off printer color management. From your description of printing from photoshop, it seems that the correct setting to turn off color management in your driver might be ColorSync > Profile: Automatic ("Canon Pro9000 PR3" is displayed), rather than none. (I don't have a Canon printer, so knowing the specifics of where the settings are and what they're named can be tricky--but this setting sounds like it's picking up the profile from what photoshop is sending it, and it should work the same way for Ap). As you've described what you've done, Aperture has adjusted the data for the PR3 profile, and sent it to the printer, which was expecting un-corrected data and applied whatever canned corrections Canon printers apply.
What did I get? a muddy and over saturated photo WITH A BORDER
Followed the same steps, only this time set the ColorSync Profile to "System Managed" (step 8 from above); everything else remained the same
What did I get? An slightly better quality image without a border (still slightly over saturated)
In theory, in this case, you sent un-corrected data, and got the canned corrections, but I think that the black point compensation might not have been expected by the printer, and that's where the over-saturation comes in.
If you did want to try what Eoin suggested, after selecting "System Managed", you'd want to re-open the printer dialogue and select the profile from the colorsync drop down, if you can. The reason I don't like this is that you're now potentially involving two devices in managing color, where if you turn it off in the printer, then you know it's off. Also, you can count on either Aperture or Photoshop having much better color management conversions than the printer itself.
So let's do a test to see if Canon Pro9000 PR3 isn't the right profile for the paper....
Do the same thing in Photoshop...
1. File > Print with Preview (print preview window opens)
2. click Page Setup (printer driver dialog opens)
3. Format for: Canon Pro9000
4. Paper Size: 5" x"7" (borderless)
5. click "OK" (returned to print preview window)
7: I want a borderless print and the orientation is not 5x7 so I set the scale to 66.89% to fill the paper with slight cropping
8: tick "Show More Options"
9: select "Color Management" from dropdown
10: Source Space: Document: Adobe RGB(1998)
*note: other choice is "Proof Setup: Generic CMYK Profile"
11: Print Space: select "Canon Pro9000 PR3" from Profile dropdown
12. Left "Relative Colormetric" selected in Intent dropdown
13: "Use Black Point Compensation" was ticked, I left it on
14: click "Print"
15: click "Proceed" from a cropping warning modal box
16: standard system print window opens
17: Printer: Canon Pro9000
18: Presets: Standard
19: select "Color Matching" from dropdown and use ColorSync > Profile: Automatic ("Canon Pro9000 PR3" is displayed)
20: choose "Quality and Media" from dropdown
21: Select "Photo Paper Plus Glossy" from Media Type
22: Print a top-quality photo is ticked, I leave it that way
23: click "Print"
What do I get? A pretty darn good quality print very close to what I see on screen
Source space only gives you a choice between the color space of the document and the one that you currently have set for proofing. Use the document one (in this case Adobe RGB). It sounds like this might be correct. It all hinges on whether that ColorSync: Automatic setting in fact means that the printer understands that it's being passed profiled data from the application. But if the print matches what you see on screen when you have soft proofing turned on, then it's probably right.
I haven't commented at all about the whole border thing. I know it's wacked and it's differently wacked on different printers, so I can't help with that
cheers,
jt