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Author Topic: CS5 "no colour management" print option gone  (Read 56952 times)

Rhossydd

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« on: May 01, 2010, 10:48:35 am »

The new print dialogue in PS CS5 no longer contains a ‘no colour management’ option. When profiling targets need to be printed, they need to be passed with no colour management to the driver.
Adobe have published a technote http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/834/cpsid_83497.html detailing some work rounds. The technote says it applies not only to Mac OSX, which I know has issues with untagged files, but also to Windows too.

Can someone explain why just using the ‘let printer manage colours’ option isn’t an easier choice for printing untagged files through CS5 on Windows systems ?

From what I can see and measure this option just passes the data through unchanged. Am I missing something here ?

Thanks

Paul
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digitaldog

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #1 on: May 01, 2010, 11:24:03 am »

It was removed to make the dialog easier for the masses (few need to print using No Color Management) and because this kind of print path has in the past been problematic for a number of reasons. Adobe will release a product for free to allow you to print said untagged targets in the future. In the meantime you can print using an older version of Photoshop or simply use the "null" profile technique whereby you assign a working space (say Adobe RGB (1998)) and in the Color Management option (Let Photoshop Manage Color), select the same profile from the list.
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Rhossydd

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #2 on: May 01, 2010, 11:38:50 am »

Quote from: digitaldog
It was removed to make the dialog easier for the masses (few need to print using No Color Management)
Yes, I understand all that, especially given the Mac OSX issues, but what's wrong with passing the data to the printer under 'let printer manage colours' on Windows systems ?
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JeffKohn

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #3 on: May 01, 2010, 11:44:26 am »

I've never printed from Photoshop's dialog (I either use the Canon plug-in or QImage), and frankly I find the options a little bit confusing. In CS4 how would selecting "No Color Management" be different from selecting "Printer Color Management" as long as the printer driver allows you to set color management to "none"? I notice that with the "Printer Manages Colors" option, rendering intent is still enabled as a choice which doesn't make much sense to me at all, since I would think you'd be setting options like that in the driver for that mode.

Looking at the dialog makes me glad I never use it. I'll stick to the Canon plug-in, thank you.
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Jeff Kohn
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Farmer

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #4 on: May 01, 2010, 06:37:46 pm »

Selecting Printer Manages Colour still provides a colour space reference to the printer driver (or if you don't, the printer driver will make an assumption about the colour space - typically either sRGB or Adobe RGB depending on driver settings).  It's quite different to having No Colour Management.

The dialogue is quite easy (and much easier now):

1. If you want to use a colour managed workflow, choose Photoshop Manages Colour, choose your ICC profile for your printer/paper combination, choose your rendering intent and then in your driver turn off all colour management.

2. If you want your printer driver to determine colour output, choose Printer Manages Colour and go into your driver and set things the way you want.

3. If you want to print targets for profile creation, use the utility which will be released through Adobe Labs.

For Photographers looking to acheive the best results, I would strongly recommend option 1 or using a 3rd party option such as the Canon plugin or Qimage or a RIP etc.
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Phil Brown

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #5 on: May 02, 2010, 04:53:11 pm »

Quote from: Farmer
Selecting Printer Manages Colour still provides a colour space reference to the printer driver (or if you don't, the printer driver will make an assumption about the colour space - typically either sRGB or Adobe RGB depending on driver settings).  It's quite different to having No Colour Management.

The dialogue is quite easy (and much easier now)
That's all well and good, but if Photoshop is just passing the tagged document to the printer without modification, having a rendering intent option doesn't make much sense, hence my confusion. Indeed, according to this post the rendering intention option has no effect in this scenario. The fact that it's enabled is misleading.

Quote
3. If you want to print targets for profile creation, use the utility which will be released through Adobe Labs.
But it's not available yet, is it?

And it seems to me that option 2 _should_ work as well for printing targets, as long as color management in the print driver is also disabled. Otherwise that would mean Photoshop is doing something it shouldn't be.

Quote
For Photographers looking to acheive the best results, I would strongly recommend option 1 or using a 3rd party option such as the Canon plugin or Qimage or a RIP etc.
Generally speaking I would agree. The two obvious exceptions are printing profile targets and using the monochrome mode that some print drivers have.

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madmanchan

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #6 on: May 02, 2010, 08:31:11 pm »

Quote from: JeffKohn
But it's not available yet, is it?

No, it is not.

Quote
And it seems to me that option 2 _should_ work as well for printing targets, as long as color management in the print driver is also disabled. Otherwise that would mean Photoshop is doing something it shouldn't be.

Depends on the platform. On OS X, for example, this is not true. If you use printer color management on OS X, the driver must have color management enabled, otherwise the OS will do the color transform.

There are very distinct printer paths between Printer Manages, Photoshop Manages, and No Color Management. In some specific cases, you'll find overlaps, and hence using one is no different than using another. But in other specific cases, they all have necessarily different behaviors.
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Eric Chan

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #7 on: May 02, 2010, 11:01:28 pm »

Why not just hide the functionality behind an alt-key modifier or something, so the average user can't trip over it?
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Rhossydd

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #8 on: May 03, 2010, 02:59:51 am »

Quote from: madmanchan
Depends on the platform.
I was specific in the original question that I was asking about Windows systems, I appreciate the Mac issues that may have brought about this change in PS.

As far as I can see and measure using 'printer manages colour' will work in the same way 'no colour management' did before on Windows systems. There seems absolutely no change in output regardless of rendering intent or working space chosen(file remains untagged, so no behind the scenes tagging seems to be happening).

Paul
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Farmer

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #9 on: May 03, 2010, 05:04:36 am »

PS is a cross platform app, though, so for consistency it makes sense to make it the same in both versions.

The problem with your proposed method is consistency.  If you choose, for example, to send ProPhoto data to the driver, you may not get the results you expect.  The file is not untagged when you use Printer Manages Colour, but if your driver is in default it's expecting sRGB or if you choose Adobe RGB in the driver and send that, then it remains consistent.  If you make an incorrect choice in the driver, you will get varying results.

As for hiding the functionality, the idea was to once and for all remove an option that the vast majority of users don't need and to make it more robust to deal with changes in the printing path in either OS (because you have a small, lightweight app to update rather than PS).
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Phil Brown

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #10 on: May 03, 2010, 11:25:39 am »

Phil's right.

I was unclear in my original post. By "platform" I meant not only the OS, but OS version, print API version, printer model, printer driver, etc. Basically the printing system when considered as a whole. The treating of tagged vs untagged data is one important distinction, in some cases. Discrepancies between incoming color data (e.g., ProPhoto) versus expected or supported color space encodings (e.g., sRGB or Adobe RGB) is another, in some cases. These distinctions apply to both Mac and Windows operating systems.
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Eric Chan

JeffKohn

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #11 on: May 03, 2010, 12:28:23 pm »

Quote
As for hiding the functionality, the idea was to once and for all remove an option that the vast majority of users don't need and to make it more robust to deal with changes in the printing path in either OS (because you have a small, lightweight app to update rather than PS).
I don't buy that. I think more and more users are probably running into this, now that profiling tools such as Colormunki have made printer profiling so much more affordable. It's not like "No Color Management" was the default choice, or even a difficult concept to understand. Reading between the lines it seems like the real reason it was removed is because Apple screwed the pooch by making this option not behave the way it should on recent versions of their OS. Personally, I hate the "Trust us, we know what's best for you" arrogance that results in taking away flexibility/functionality in the name of usability.
« Last Edit: May 03, 2010, 12:28:59 pm by JeffKohn »
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Doyle Yoder

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #12 on: May 03, 2010, 12:48:04 pm »

Quote from: JeffKohn
I don't buy that. I think more and more users are probably running into this, now that profiling tools such as Colormunki have made printer profiling so much more affordable. It's not like "No Color Management" was the default choice, or even a difficult concept to understand. Reading between the lines it seems like the real reason it was removed is because Apple screwed the pooch by making this option not behave the way it should on recent versions of their OS. Personally, I hate the "Trust us, we know what's best for you" arrogance that results in taking away flexibility/functionality in the name of usability.

I don't believe that was even an Apple screwup. It seems that only some Epson drivers had this issue. The new Epson 8.19 drivers for the 9600 do not have this problem, the Canon iPF drivers never had this problem.

Adobe taking this option out to accommodate some OLD incorrectly written printer drivers is ridiculous.

Doyle
« Last Edit: May 03, 2010, 12:48:30 pm by Doyle Yoder »
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Mark D Segal

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #13 on: May 03, 2010, 12:49:10 pm »

Quote from: JeffKohn
Personally, I hate the "Trust us, we know what's best for you" arrogance that results in taking away flexibility/functionality in the name of usability.

I agree with you - it's not good system development policy. Whatever the size of the constituency for printing profile targets, the functionality to do it properly and easily should be there, and if it confuses some people, so be it - all they have to do is a bit of reading to sort it out for themselves.
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madmanchan

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #14 on: May 03, 2010, 03:20:35 pm »

Not all current print drivers handle "no color management" correctly with the Cocoa/Quartz print path. The issue is not limited to older drivers for older, discontinued models.

To be clear, the Adobe tool to print profile targets is going to be supplied as a free download. This isn't done with the intent of "we know what's best for you." Adobe believes this is the best long-term approach to serving the needs of users who build their own printer profiles, for a number of technical, practical, and political reasons.
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Eric Chan

Czornyj

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #15 on: May 03, 2010, 04:18:12 pm »

Quote from: madmanchan
Not all current print drivers handle "no color management" correctly with the Cocoa/Quartz print path. The issue is not limited to older drivers for older, discontinued models.

To be clear, the Adobe tool to print profile targets is going to be supplied as a free download. This isn't done with the intent of "we know what's best for you." Adobe believes this is the best long-term approach to serving the needs of users who build their own printer profiles, for a number of technical, practical, and political reasons.

I like that idea - sometimes I'm building profiles for my friends, not everyone has Photoshop - so a free, simple tool to print profile targets sounds great for me.
« Last Edit: May 03, 2010, 04:18:40 pm by Czornyj »
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Rhossydd

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #16 on: May 03, 2010, 04:20:57 pm »

Quote from: madmanchan
These distinctions apply to both Mac and Windows operating systems.
Could you give an example of what WINDOWS systems/drivers are effected by this please ?

I've now tried a lot of variables(OSs, drivers etc) here, but still get identical results when printing untagged targets with 'printer manges colour' in PS CS5 when printed with colour management switched off in drivers here.

Paul
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Schewe

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #17 on: May 03, 2010, 04:28:43 pm »

Quote from: Mark D Segal
Whatever the size of the constituency for printing profile targets, the functionality to do it properly and easily should be there, and if it confuses some people, so be it - all they have to do is a bit of reading to sort it out for themselves.

There are several good reasons that Adobe has dropped No Color Management from the print dlog...first off, as Eric indicated, it doesn't ALWAYS work correctly with ALL OS and driver configs...to get it to "mostly work" was an enormous effort that could be broken with an OS update (as Apple has shown repeatedly) and subject to failure with faulty print drivers (as Epson has recently proven). But people don't seem to be willing to accept that the faults are not with Adobe so Adobe shoulders the blame. Adobe is not going to to a dot release for Photoshop every time something breaks in the hack to make NCM work. So, Adobe removed the option...

One CAN still print targets without using the NCM path...it's the work around that Eric came up with to overcome Epson's 79/9900 driver problem with CS4. Tag the untagged file with Adobe RGB, in Print, set Photoshop to manage color, set Adobe RGB as the output profile forcing a null transform then in the print driver set it to no color management (or whatever the drivers things is no color adjustment).

I'n not sure that is any more difficult and confusing than using the old No Color Management approach...it's a couple of extra steps...but if somebody can follow directions, it shouldn't be all that more difficult...

Reread Eric's last line...

"Adobe believes this is the best long-term approach to serving the needs of users who build their own printer profiles, for a number of technical, practical, and political reasons."

The technical and practical reasons should be obvious...but the toughest problem to deal with is the "political" problems. You can hack around the technical issues but when Adobe is put in the middle between the OS's and print drivers, it's a no win situation. Adobe got tired of shouldering the blame and Photoshop is an expensive application to have to use to print out targets...that's why it'll actually be easier (and ultimately better) to have a free, cross platform application designed SPECIFICALLY to properly print color targets...it'll be easy to rev the tine amount of code (compared to Photoshop) to deal with OS dependancies and to address driver issues. Ultimately it is the proper solution. It'll just tak a bit of time to get the printing app done and posted. In the meantime, use the work around for CS5, or use CS4 or CS3 or even use Apple's Preview on the Mac...ain't no big dealio, ya know?
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Rhossydd

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #18 on: May 03, 2010, 04:32:46 pm »

Quote from: Schewe
I'n not sure that is any more difficult and confusing than using the old No Color Management approach...it's a couple of extra steps...but if somebody can follow directions, it shouldn't be all that more difficult...
Er you think so ?.......... ever done much IT support ?
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Mark D Segal

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CS5 "no colour management" print option gone
« Reply #19 on: May 03, 2010, 04:40:38 pm »

Quote from: Schewe
There are several good reasons that Adobe has dropped No Color Management from the print dlog...first off, as Eric indicated, it doesn't ALWAYS work correctly with ALL OS and driver configs...to get .....................In the meantime, use the work around for CS5, or use CS4 or CS3 or even use Apple's Preview on the Mac...ain't no big dealio, ya know?

This all makes perfectly good sense to me, and it is good that Adobe will be releasing a separate app to handle it. I believe this time 'round the problem started with a Colorsync issue in the newest version of Mac OSX, but I'm not the guru on that so I'll say no more. But once again on a more general level, it does seem to raise the whole issue of coordination or lack thereof on colour management between the big players in the industry - imperfect like everything else in life. It would be nice one day if Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and the printer manufacturers (at least the major ones) got together on a seamless approach for handling stuff like this.
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