Also and very interesting: I was reading Ctein's method for letting Printer Manage etc..
This morning I set up a print according to his settings...Very impressive. I printed an image straight out of the Develop module using his 'Printer Managed' routine and it looks pretty much dead on..This feels promising for me.
Have any of you experimented with this routine? I noticed a thread on this forum about it..
Hi again Pete;
Re your question that I highlighted in bold above, I decided to have a second look at "Printer Manages Color", but I don't really "experiment" - I use scientific methods to produce repeatable and verifiable data that gives insight into the comparative quality of different processes and materials, as you would have perhaps appreciated from the numerous paper and printer reviews I have researched and written for this website.
So, following through with that approach, I prepared a test of "Printer Manages Color using Epson Legacy Baryta paper in my Epson SCP-800 printer. I regret to inform you that the results are absolutely and comparatively sub-standard. You can read-up on my methodology in the already published articles, I shall not repeat it here, except to mention that for printing the test target of course I selected Epson Color Control, Adobe RGB color space(more than enough for the target) and Gamma 2.2 in the printer driver and Printer Manages Color in the Photoshop Print screen. Just last December I had reprofiled my P800 for this paper in the usual way I make custom profiles (i1Profiler, i1Pro2 spectrophotometer, XRite 2033 patch target, dual scan mode for M0, M1 and M2 measurement conditions, etc.)
Key comparative results are as follows for the Printer Manages Color option (with the standard Photoshop Manages Color using my custom profile in brackets beside).
Overall Accuracy, Average dE: 6.05 (0.89)
Neutrals Average dE: 3.14 (1.08)
dE colour bias of the grayscale: 1.68 (0.82)
Three Worst Outcomes dE: Orange 13.6; Purplish Blue 10.3; Blue 13.4; (Cyan 1.6; 50% Gray 1.3; Foliage 1.2)
The "worst outcomes" for my custom profile are indeed not bad at all, the results for those colours under "Printer Manages Color" being considerably worse at 4.8, 3.1 and 5.0 respectively.
The instrument Epson used to make the internal profile that gets selected for Printer Color Management is not the same as my instrument, so a bit of measurement difference could be attributed to variances of the measurement technology itself, however nothing near to the extent of the gaps shown here.
As far as I'm concerned "Printer Manages Color" once again is demonstrably inferior to a high quality custom profiling approach using active colour management. I'll admit, however, this stuff can be charmingly deceptive, in the sense that just looking at the printed test target before any measurement, it doesn't look too bad at all. When the two targets are viewed side by side however, differences of these magnitudes are indeed noticeable.