Lightroom and Imageprint

[bertlwolf]

Hi, has anybody some tips for me what kind of profile to choose inside lightrooms colormanagement printing dialog when I would like to  print with Imageprints  " Print through App."  opportunity?  Under the "other"  tab only a small number of my profiles appear. and my print has a strong drift to magenta.
It looks like if you forget to turn off Epsons printer color management and try to print out of Photoshop  having Photoshop manageing colors.  

Thank you Wolfgang

[michael]

You use the profiles that are within Imageprint.

Go to the newly installed Imageprint menu items in the printer driver and select them from there. All the Imageprint profiles that you've downloaded are there.

Michael

[Roey Horns]

I have similar problems: I have printed the same PSD from ImagePrint and from Lightroom via IP TPA.

If I choose "Managed By Printer" in LR and a Bitmap Profile of "Adobe RGB" in the "ImagePrint Profile Settings" of the print driver I get a magenta cast. If I choose a Bitmap Profile of "none" I get a green cast instead.

I have managed to get good output out of Photoshop by choosing Color Handling "No Color Management" in Photoshop and setting the Bitmap Profile to "Adobe RGB" in the "ImagePrint Profile Settings" of the print driver. Unfortunately Lightroom doesn't offer a Colormanagement Off option.

Michael: Does the color you get out of LR match what you get directly out of IP?

- Roey

[michael]

What you're missing is that you're still printing with Imageprint, not the application or OS.

Ignore all of Lightroom's or Photoshop's settings. They are irrelevant when printing with PTAPP.

Just go to the Imageprint settings under File / Print within the applications and set things in the same way that you do within Imageprint itself. Ignore everything else.

Michael

[Roey Horns]

Michael, thanks for your reply. I believe I have correctly configured the ImagePrint options in the print driver dialog, since I get correct output from Photoshop. However, it is not sufficient to ignore LR's settings since you need to make sure that it doesn't do anything stupid to your colors.

With the same correct ImagePrint settings it makes a big difference if I set Photoshop to "Color Management Off" or "Let Printer Determine Colors". The former gives correct output while the latter produces a distinct green cast.

The LR default setting of "Managed by Printer" results in the same output as the PS option "Let Printer Determine Colors" (green cast). There doesn't seem to be a "Color Management Off" option in Lightroom.

- Roey

[michael]

I'm away from my office till next Friday. Let me see what's up when I get back and I'll follow up then.

Michael

[Roey Horns]

I have contacted ColorByte and here is what they recommend for printing from Photoshop:

Photoshop Print with Preview
-- Color Management
---- Print: Document (Profile: Adobe RGB (1998))
-- Options
---- Color Handling: Let Photoshop Determine Colors
---- Working RGB - Adobe RGB (1998)

Printer Dialog
-- ImagePrint Profile Settings
---- Bitmap
------ Profile: Adobe RGB 1998
----Printer
[your ImagePrint Settings]

This assumes that you use Adobe RGB as your working profile.

So, it seem that you'd simply need to specify Adobe RGB as the target color profile in Lightroom and you are home free. Unfortunately, like Wolfgang, I have only a limited set of profiles to choose from in Lightroom, with Adobe RGB not being one of them. It looks like this version of Lightroom only offers printer device profiles.

- Roey

[Roey Horns]

Michael,

Have you had a chance to look into this further?

Thanks

- Roey

[digitaldog]

There are known printing "issues" in beta 2 of Lightroom. In some cases, it's somewhat intermittent. You can check some of the posts on the LR forum. At this point, it might be safest to render the images and print them inside of ImagePrint directly (that's how I've been working with IP).

As for the ColorByte suggestion, seems gooofy to me. Why not "NO Color Managememnt"? Or Let Printer Determine Color (assuming IP is working as it should in recognizing the embedded profile passed to it). Let Photoshop Determine color and selecting the same profile could work I guess but it's odd. IP *should* work with Let Printer Determine (that's the reason for that setting). Of course if the "driver" doesn't recognize the embedded profile as a Postscript driver should... I'll have to ping John P about this one.

[chrislaurence]

I have similar problems: I have printed the same PSD from ImagePrint and from Lightroom via IP TPA.

If I choose "Managed By Printer" in LR and a Bitmap Profile of "Adobe RGB" in the "ImagePrint Profile Settings" of the print driver I get a magenta cast.
- Roey
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=59027\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

A year later, I have an almost identical problem in LRv1.0.  Printing using regular ImagePrint 6.1 (Windows) is fine, printing from CS3 using the approach in the earlier post is also fine (I happen to be using ProPhotoRGB vs. AdobeRGB).  Using print through application ("PTAPP") on TIFF or PSD files tagged with the ProPhotoRGB space works fine.  An images printed in any of these ways is consistent.

However, I have not been able to get consistent color (consistent with the above output or with my calibrated monitor) printing DNG's in LR through ImagePrint PTAPP.  Using the "Managed By Printer" approach above, when I assign the ProPhotoRGB space in the print driver's bitmap setting, I get an alarming, extreme magenta cast.  (I know the DNG isn't converted into a color space but my preferences specify ProPhoto and I understand LR's internal color space is similar).  Using AdobeRGB I get a much more "normal" image, but one that is definitely any very visibly undersaturated.

I just discussed with Colorbyte who were helpful and have some theories we'll play around with (like tagging ProPhotoRGB as a print profile so I can choose that instead of managed by printer).  

But, has anyone using PTAPP and Lightroom on Windows figured this out already?

Thanks for any input.

Chris

[mikeojohnson]

I have the same problem and am interested in the resolution.
Mike

[chrislaurence]

I think we got to a solution, but I have only been able to look at one test print due to time.  But, it looked to completely eliminate the drastic magenta shift and provided what looked to be an accurate color output (as compared to "regular" ImagePrint, and to CS2 PTAPP, of the same shot).

Solution:  Colorbyte support tweaked a ProPhotoRGB profile to make it look like a printer profile.  I then selected that in Lightroom, rather than "let printer control colors."  

I plan to test more, but if you want to try it, I've attached the ProPhoto profile which will look to Lightroom like a printer profile.  But, IMPORTANT, I had to rename the file with a .txt attachment so the board would take it.  Rename it to .icm.

I'd appreciate hearing your results.

Thanks,
Chris

[davidokun]

I have been trying, but I have not had much success with this method.

Colorbyte has loaded this profile of their FTP site to ensure that it is not corrupted via e-mail or renaming it to an .icm file.

When I try and choose Profile: ProPhoto Print RGB I get an error when I try and print within LR.

See attached file for screen shots of my settings.

I’m running XP and I don’t seam to have any problems printing to PTAPP via CS2.


In addition Grayscale prints via LR are dead neutral.

It is only recently that I have noticed the color shift issue as I was using Adobe RGB as bitmap profile to print Grayscale and I have only recently [attachment=2182:attachment]tried to print some color images.
.

[pnome]

Also tried with the AdobeRGB and ProPhoto RGB PRINT profiles provided by ColorByte. Error message and didn't work.

So I tested with the following settings;

LR: Managed by printer
IP PTAPP Bitmap profile: sRGB, Adobe RGB and ProPhoto RGB

The magenta casts is strongest with ProPhoto, weaker with Adobe RGB and almost non existent with sRGB.

So, it seems LR's Managed by printer setting produces sRGB files!

But... printing thru the sRGB profile seems such a waste.

Anyone else to confirm this?

Pål

[andersonl]

I had exactly the same results.  I'm testing it in Aperture as well to see if it's consistent.  Shame it's sRGB.

[pnome]

I emailed ColorByte support yesterday; here is the response I got;

"LightRoom has terrible color management and no soft proofing, and unfortunately, it won't output to a source space like Adobe 1998 or Pro Photo.  It wants either a printer space, or it will put out to SRGB.  Our hands are tied there, I'm afraid, as that's all it will pass out to us.

Hopefully, the next version will actually handle color management properly, but right now, I'm afraid you hit on the only combination that works--let printer handle color management, and choose SRGB as our Bitmap->RGB profile.

Thanks,

-Daniel"

CONCLUSION; Use either
1) Export to TIFF, then import TIFF to ImagePrint - with your choice of color space, or
2) Print thru PTAPP - limited to sRGB color space

Best regards,
Pål

[icke]

CONCLUSION; Use either
1) Export to TIFF, then import TIFF to ImagePrint - with your choice of color space, or
2) Print thru PTAPP - limited to sRGB color space

almost 2 more years and new versions of LR and IP down the line...

i found this rather old post because i seem to have the same problem. i had recently updated to ImagePrint v7 and splashed out on ptap so that i can seamlessly print  from LR 2 using IP profiles.

i ended up here because i have the same problem as described earlier in this thread. when using the IP print driver and tagging the image with adobe 1998 rgb i get a bit of a green cast and when using pro photo rgb the dreaded magenta cast. i haven't tried srgb but i guess that would be besides the point of using a rip to get the best results possible...
when using the standard leopard printer driver for my (oldish by now) epson 2100, i get good looking prints. using tiff files directly from IP i get good results too. but as you can imagine, i'd like to capitalise on the PTAP expenditure and was wondering if anybody knows if there is a solution out there that i haven't found yet?

if not, it seems as if i may have wasted quite some money on PTAP...

thanks,
o

[jwlimages]

My experience trying to print to a RIP (ColorBurst, in my case) confirms your frustration.

Theoretically, you should be able to print directly/have the RIP act as "printer" (Photoshop & other apps work correctly this way), but with LR, no way. I suspect it may be related to the fact that this print flow goes "around" the OS, unlike printing to, say, the Epson RGB driver. For example, since ColorBurst is a Postscript RIP, LR sends it a .ps file, which seems to guarantee color management issues.

At one of their promo events, I had a conversation with Tom Hogarty about this problem, who at the time sounded encouraging about LR engineers being interested in solving such issues. So I followed up with an email detailing the print "pipeline" to this RIP & output results, etc. - no response.

I don't think they will address this issue. In their "defense", it's probably enough of a headache to try to maintain a reliable print stream through the Mac OS as it is...

The workaround is still to export to tiff & drop that into the RIP directly. (hope PTAP wasn't too expensive)

John

JWL Images
Emeryville, CA

almost 2 more years and new versions of LR and IP down the line...

i found this rather old post because i seem to have the same problem. i had recently updated to ImagePrint v7 and splashed out on ptap so that i can seamlessly print  from LR 2 using IP profiles.

...<snip>...

if not, it seems as if i may have wasted quite some money on PTAP...

thanks,
o