Epson printer & Windows 7-color management problem

[MichaelEzra]

Has anyone solved how to setup color managed workflow in Windows 7?

I had a perfectly working system with XP:
in CS4 convert document to Printer & Paper ICC profile and print with Color Management OFF in CS4 Print dialog & Epson driver settings.

I am trying to do exactly the same in Win7x64 and getting not accurate results.
Reds are weak.

Attached image illustrates all my settings.
There also seem to be a strange behavior of CS4 - compare results in steps 2 & 3. I expect these to be identical.

As a side note, ABW printing of grayscale images works perfectly fine. Only color printing seems to be an issue.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Paul Eby]

Has anyone solved how to setup color managed workflow in Windows 7?

I had a perfectly working system with XP:
in CS4 convert document to Printer & Paper ICC profile and print with Color Management OFF in CS4 Print dialog & Epson driver settings.

I am trying to do exactly the same in Win7x64 and getting not accurate results.
Reds are weak.

Attached image illustrates all my settings.
There also seem to be a strange behavior of CS4 - compare results in steps 2 & 3. I expect these to be identical.

As a side note, ABW printing of grayscale images works perfectly fine. Only color printing seems to be an issue.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I'm not using Win7 but my work flow set up is a little different than yours.

In CS4 I have the document set at Adobe RGB and print with colour management on (Photoshop managing) and then enter my paper profile at that point. - Paul

[Farmer]

I would not recommend the workflow that you are using.

Do not convert your image to the printer colour space.

Keep it in whatever colour space your document is in.

Choose Photoshop Manages Colour and then choose the appropriate ICC profile for the printer/paper combination that you are printing to.  Choose a rendering intent as appropriate.

In the Epson driver, select your media settings appropriately and choose NCA (as you have).

That will provide a consistent, working colour managed workflow in XP, Vista or 7 (32 or 64 bit).

There's no need to change any of the Windows 7 system colour management settings.

[hilljf]

You mention that "reds are a little weak".  This outcome is being created by using the "perceptual" intent when you convert to the color space of the paper.  The Paper normally has a much smaller color space capability than your source editing profile.  When you convert using perceptual that will move most colors 'proportionally' into the smaller color space, reducing saturation on colors, especially those that are out of or on the edge of the gamut.

A good practice would be to soft proof your image while it is in your working space using the paper profile as the target.  There you can compare the effect of using perceptual vs colormetric and see which you like better.  The occasional downside fo colormetric converstions is that it 'clips' out of gamut colors to the edge of the color space of the paper, but the benefit is it does minimal change if any to the colors which fit in the space of your paper.

Nothing to do with windows 7, your issues all appear to be from approaches to color space conversion.

thanks, John