Printer Dialog Box in CS4 - Printing Grayscale Images

Question

I hope I'm not duplicating a new topic. I thought I opened this topic yesterday but I don't seem to be able to locate it in this forum. So, I'll try again. This is a pivotal CS4 question re printer set-up for grayscale images with and without b&w profiles.
When setting up print parameters for a Grayscale image in PS CS4 I no longer have the option to select "No Color Management." It seems to be available to RGB images but not grayscale. Which leads to the question as to how I set up print parameters to print grayscale images using Advanced Black & White mode. Can you help?
Regards,
King Dexter

Answer 1

As it turns out my original problem has led into a more serious set of color management changes found in CS4. In my case, for instance, I'm finding it difficult to determine the correct way to print untagged, ABW grayscale profiling targets. Others are having similar difficulties with color profiling. Other forums are buzzing as people migrate to PSCS4: Here are just a few examples that hopefully will attract Adobe attention here:
Excerpt #1:
Sounds like this should be raised in the PS forums where Chris Cox
will pick it up. (I raised the colour mgt issues of Bridge there and
they picked that up.)
Excerpt #2:
The deeper explanation going on here has to do with printing interfaces on OS X changing over time. In the past, some printer drivers (notably Canon, with its older iPF series printers) did not interpret the image data appropriately and thus had incorrect driver settings that could not be reset by the user. Photoshop CS3 worked around some of these issues for specific drivers, but did not conform to Apple's OS X specifications for how to pass image data to the print driver, leading to problems elsewhere. With CS4, Adobe has taken the approach of conforming to Apple's latest print driver interface specifications, so CS4 now has the same behavior as LR with regards to printing on OS X.
However, many print drivers have not been updated to conform to the OS X printing interface, and thus some folks are experiencing printing issues, such as double color-management. This is unfortunate, but it really needs to be addressed by the printer drivers.
Now, back to the ABW situation: I don't know if Epson has a glitch with the ABW driver under the latest OS X release. I have occasionally seen what you've seen: i.e., I hit "Print" in PS CS4 and nothing comes out. But then I mess around a little with the Epson printer driver configuration and then it works.
In particular, I found that if I had an older "saved setting" or preset within the Epson driver that I used to recall a particular ABW driver setting, then it would fail. So I deleted all my Epson driver presets and started again from scratch (manually selecting media type, color mode, ABW settings, paper config, etc.) Then I haven't had any trouble printing ABW images since.
Excerpt #3
I've done some testing of various color management approaches and it is indeed
confusing.
Here's what I've deduced using CS3 and CS4 with drivers printing stepwedges.
CS3 with No Color Mgmt I consider the "correct" result. The driver gets 21
evenly stepped values.
With CS4, only Photoshop Manages Color with Print Profile = Working Gray Space
gives the identical results. (assuming grayscale, untagged file).
Printer Manages Color makes a default conversion to Generic Gray Profile which
is a gamma 1.8 profile. If you happen to use GG 1.8 as a working space this conversion may not hurt but if you use GG 2.2 it'll darken the print. I think this has been true in PS for
several versions.
To make things more complicated OS X 10.5 has a new print dialog pane called
Color Matching which allows you to select Colorsync vs driver based mode and ICC profiles. I
don't know how this will affect things -- I'd leave it alone.
No Color Management is selectable with an RGB file but I just got blank pages
with this option.
-- QTR definitely received a blank page from the system. This is probably
related to your
ABW printing not working.
Note that the CS4 documentation specifically states to use No CM for making
custom ICC profiles.