I recently profiled this Lexmark C543 color laser printer that I have with a ColorMunki. Through some powerful magic that I don't understand, the ColorMunki stuff decided that it needed to generate a CMYK profile for the C543. Everything looks great when using Photoshop's color management stuff to print with this profile. Yay!
But trying to get this CMYK profile to work with other stuff seems to be a problem. After tinkering around for 2 hours trying to figure out why neither the ColorSync print options (in the system Print dialog box) nor Lightroom would recognize the profile, I finally managed to figure out that Lightroom (at least) doesn't support CMYK profiles (according to the docs, and according to it not working).
Uh, ok? Well, that's kind of sad. Then again, Lightroom should really have soft proofing too, and it doesn't. (Adobe please..... these seem like basic features for a supposedly professional level application like Lightroom! Just copy the Photoshop RIP into Lightroom and disable some of the fancier options. Nobody is going to stop buying Photoshop as a result. END OF RANT)
Lightroom is one thing, but why the heck won't ColorSync in the system print driver stuff recognize and use a CMYK profile?
The other thing that I notice that I can't find an answer to is that RGB profiles almost always seem to have XYZ as the PCS, and CMYK profiles almost always have a Lab PCS. I suspect maybe this has something to do with the problem, but why is Lab any better than XYZ for CMYK profiles? Do I need a Lab<->XYZ profile or something to get these things connected?
Is there anything I can do to get other apps to work with CMYK profiles via the print driver, or am I stuck herding everything through Photoshop even for simple stuff? (Hopefully I won't be using this printer too much anyway.)