A few weeks ago, I told everyone here I was no longer going to be posting in this forum because I really needed to recover some personal time....the best laid plans of mice and men
I poured my new found extra time into making some new prints of my personal photography, and also beginning some new light fade tests. Both endeavors depend on accurately printed color and a stable color managed workflow. I immediately stepped waist deep into dozens of man hours of time trying to figure out why my Mac's color management pipeline was now seriously broken. I could get accurate color only on my iPF8300 using the 16 bit plugin. All other printers I have in my studio use the OEM supplied driver, and I could not print to any one of them with decent color accuracy out of the latest version of Photoshop CC. Say it ain't so, Adobe! Application managed color from PS has always been more trustworthy than printer managed color. Not!
I concur entirely with all of Mark S.'s findings. With the Epson driver for my SC P600, the problem is most easily seen in the blues and magentas, essentially a reversal of the classic blue-turns-purple problem where blues and purplish blues are now losing magenta and moving much more cyan in hue, with massive delta E variances just as Mark S. reported. It's a rather insidious problem for an Epson user because to the casual observer, the lower chroma colors which dictate the overall color balance of the print aren't seriously whacked, and most printed images don't look so obviously wrong that one would suspect anything other than just a poor quality ICC profile to be to blame. Probably part of the reason why Adobe engineers didn't spot the issue themselves.
But wait, there's more! On the Latest Canon printers (Pro-1, Pro-1000, etc), the color errors manifest differently and are more clearly messed up. Even an untrained observer will find the print quality seriously messed up. Color gets truly weird and muddier, almost as if the color pipeline is assigning an sRGB profile on top of the paper profile's conversion or some such nonsense. Anyway, here are my current workarounds:
1) For older Canon imageprograph printers like 8100, 8300, 8400, etc. use the Canon 16 bit plugin. Always worked great and still does.
2) for newer Canon models like Pro-1000, use the Canon Studio Print Pro plugin for PS or standalone version. Interestingly enough, it hands the data off to the regular Canon OEM driver, but manages to bypass the current Adobe PS (and presumably LR) data corruption nonsense. This result was clear proof to me that it's an Adobe software problem, not a new printer driver issue.
3) For Epson and other printers, convert the image to the appropriate destination profile, then save as 8 bit tif and "print as color target" out of the Colorsync utility (CSU). Sadly enough, CSU also has a nasty bug where it can't currently print a 16 bit tif file correctly (in my tests, it turned media whitepoint light gray for 16 bit but not 8 bit data). You have to use 8 bit to get around that nonsense. Alternatively, you can let CSU make the color conversion, but you will get the apple CMM not the Adobe CMM if you do that. Not a big deal, but a subtle thing to note. Mac's Preview app can also be used as a safe printer pipeline, but in Apple's typical "dumb it down for the consumer" world, Preview loses the rendering intent options that you have available in CSU.
Even though I've had twenty five years of color management experience, I still feel like a poster child for all that ails a color managed workflow
It never ceases to amaze me how often and how easily this technology gets stomped on by OS updates, or priinter drivers, and sad to say, even Adobe engineers who really should know better. No wonder photographers struggle so much to master this printing technology. It's a mine field.
best,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com 
