Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Digital Image Processing => Topic started by: Kirk Gittings on September 02, 2012, 05:01:56 pm

Title: Printing from PS
Post by: Kirk Gittings on September 02, 2012, 05:01:56 pm
I print to my liking using ABW and Madman Chan's profiles. So this is not a question of not getting the quality I want in CS4-6. But.....I've always wondered about this statement-see attached-as I have never been able to find where one disables printer color management in the "Printer Settings" area.
Title: Re: Printing from PS
Post by: Redcrown on September 02, 2012, 05:47:15 pm
I'm confused that your confused, and can't see any "attachment" in your message. Since you're using Chan's method, I assume you have been here:

http://people.csail.mit.edu/ericchan/dp/Epson3800/printworkflow.html#abw_no_gray_curve

That contains detail on all print settings, both Photoshop and the printer driver.

Title: Re: Printing from PS
Post by: Kirk Gittings on September 02, 2012, 05:51:07 pm
Sorry I guess I forgot to up load it. Yes of course I've been to that page-been using his profiles for a few years. But I never understood the two circled things in the PS printing setup. As I tried to explain-there is no place that I can find where one can "disable printer color management in the circled "Print Settings" dialogue box and that circled box is the only designated Print Settings box.  Am I just misreading this?
Title: Re: Printing from PS
Post by: Alan Goldhammer on September 02, 2012, 08:55:31 pm
I could not tell from the dialog box that you show but I think it's MacOS, correct?  If so you cannot use Eric's profiles and workflow as MacOS does not allow this anymore.  There was a lengthy thread on this some months ago.

Alan

EDIT:  Here's a link to the OS issues:  http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=61135.msg498483#msg498483
Title: Re: Printing from PS
Post by: Bart_van_der_Wolf on September 02, 2012, 08:59:53 pm
As I tried to explain-there is no place that I can find where one can "disable printer color management in the circled "Print Settings" dialogue box and that circled box is the only designated Print Settings box.  Am I just misreading this?

Hi Kirk,

That would be a printer driver setting with regards to something related to output profile settings, not something you can set from within Photoshop.

Cheers,
Bart
Title: Re: Printing from PS
Post by: Kirk Gittings on September 02, 2012, 09:54:38 pm
I could not tell from the dialog box that you show but I think it's MacOS, correct?  If so you cannot use Eric's profiles and workflow as MacOS does not allow this anymore.  There was a lengthy thread on this some months ago.

Alan

EDIT:  Here's a link to the OS issues:  http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=61135.msg498483#msg498483

Thanks for your responce but this is Windows 7. Chan's profiles work fine as I said. ASMOF I was printing with them tonight, but I have always been curious about this warning and finally thought I would ask. I have seen this same confounding statement since CS4 I think.
Title: Re: Printing from PS
Post by: Kirk Gittings on September 02, 2012, 09:55:34 pm
Hi Kirk,

That would be a printer driver setting with regards to something related to output profile settings, not something you can set from within Photoshop.

Cheers,
Bart

Thanks. IE don't worry about it right?
Title: Re: Printing from PS
Post by: Bart_van_der_Wolf on September 02, 2012, 10:25:30 pm
Thanks. IE don't worry about it right?

Hi Kirk,

Well, that depends on what's set in the printer driver ...

I'm not an Epson printer user, so i unfortunately can't tell you where to look in all their models' driver settings.

Cheers,
Bart
Title: Re: Printing from PS
Post by: Redcrown on September 03, 2012, 01:01:17 am
Kirk,

First, I confess to using the Epson "ABW" feature only once, when I first got the 3880 printer over a year ago. But I went back and reviewed Eric Chan's description, plus two others I've bookmarked, and now I think I understand your confusion.

Photoshop does not know about or understand Epson's ABW. What Photoshop thinks is that you should control color management either in Photoshop itself or in the printer driver, but you should not use both. With normal color printing, double profiling is a big mistake and results in garbage.

So, when you tell Photoshop to do the color management, it puts up that warning to "remember to disable the printer's color management." That is just a generic warning. Photoshop has no knowledge of what printer you are using so it does not know how "disable color management" might appear in your printer's control dialogue. It's unlikely that those exact words appear in any printer's dialogue.

In the Epson driver, you would disable color management by setting the mode to "custom" and then selecting "off" in the drop-down menu. On a Canon or HP printer, I'm sure it's quite different.

However, when using the Epson ABW feature, you actually do configure both Photoshop and the printer driver to do color management. That's counter-intuitive to normal color printing. But when doing ABW, the Photoshop part of the color management work only prepares the image data for the ABW function of the Epson Driver. That's what Eric's profiles do. Those who do not use Eric's profiles are instructed to set sRGB as the profile in the Photoshop color management dialogue (instead of the Epson profile for the paper being used).

Here are two other sources about ABW that help explain this:

http://www.ronmartblog.com/2010/08/how-to-using-epsons-advanced-b-photo.html
http://gerryeskinstudio.com/ABW_sept08_paper/index.html
Title: Re: Printing from PS
Post by: Farmer on September 03, 2012, 05:59:33 am
To clarify - you only select colour management in Photoshop to use ABW if you want to use Eric's method.  That is not how the functionality was designed, but it's a perfectly valid method of using it if it works for you.

Normally, you would switch off colour management in PS and then use the ABW functionality, if you were to follow the intended design.
Title: Re: Printing from PS
Post by: Kirk Gittings on September 03, 2012, 01:09:32 pm
Thank you. That really helps.