custom HP printer profile not seen by LR4 beta

[Terry Thrift]

Hi:

After viewing the 2011 Camera to Print and Screen video, I was motivated to manage the color with my current equipment. 
Great videos, btw. 

I have been using Aperture and PS.  But since the expertise expressed in the video was specific to LR and PS, I decided to try LR again using the following equipment.

2008 MacBook Pro (Lion 10.7.2)
LR4 beta (with soft proofing!)
ColorMunki Photo (app ver 1.1.1)
HP Color LaserJet CP2025dn (driver ver 18.4)

I may have successfully turned off Color Management in the HP printer driver with these settings:
   a) ColorMatching -> in Printer
   b) Color/QualityOptions -> Advanced -> Photographs -> RGB Color -> None
   c) Color/QualityOptions -> EdgeControl -> Off

I built profiles for my lcd and printer/paper with ColorMunki.

I can view a soft proof using the new printer profile using Preview.
Yeah! Looking Good.

However, the new printer profile does not appear in LR4 beta's "Choose Profile" dialog.
There are a number of other profiles available to add, but not the newly created profile.

Using the ColorSync Utility I see my custom printer profile to be
icc Version: 4.0.0
Class: Output
Space: CMYK
PCS: Lab

LR4 beta does recognize a generic HP/Apple supplied driver for my printer.
icc Version: 2.0.0
Class: Output
Space: RGB
PCS: XYZ


So, what do I know:

ColorMunki produced a CMYK profile for the HP printer.
The HP printer does have 4 toner cartridges (CMYK).
The HP driver settings claimed it would send raw RGB to the printer.
LR4 beta does like the HP generic RGB profile.
LR4 beta doesn't like something about the custom CMYK profile.

Who should I talk about resolving this?

ColorMunki?
HP?
Adobe?


Thanks,
-Terry Thrift-

[Alan Goldhammer]

Your ColorMunki is probably set to create Version 4 icc profiles and I believe this might be the problem.  There were some threads a while back about this and the suggestion was made (maybe by Andrew Rodney) to change the setting to only create Version 2 profiles.  I don't run a MacOS or create version 4 profiles and on my Win machine all of the profiles I have created are seen by LR4, including some ColorMunki profiles that I made back in 2009 (version 2 profiles).

[CASpyr]

However, the new printer profile does not appear in LR4 beta's "Choose Profile" dialog.
There are a number of other profiles available to add, but not the newly created profile.

Alan's suggestion might well solve the problem. There is one other rather simple thing you might want to try:
When bringing up the profile list, you'll see 'Other...' at the bottom. Click there, and it will bring up a list of ALL the profiles installed on your system. However, only some of them have a tick mark next to them. That's the ones that appear in the first profile list. If your custom profile has no tick mark, you cannot see it in the list.
Sorry if I'm telling you something obvious and trivial...but I was confused by this a while back myself.

Good luck!

[Terry Thrift]

Thanks for the input and ideas.

CASpyr:

Pressing "Other" brings up the "Choose Profile" dialog.
The CMYK printer profile does not appear there.


Alan: 

I might try generating an icc version 2 profile in ColorMunki. 
But if it produces a CMYK profile I will apparently be dead in the water.

LR4 beta does not support CMYK printer profiles for soft proofing or printing.
http://forums.adobe.com/message/4140920#4140920

Since LR4 beta accepts only RGB profiles,
perhaps ColorMunki can generate an RGB printer profile that is an improvement on HP's generic sRGB profile.

But I have no clue which HP driver settings would accept raw RGB data and otherwise get out of the way.

It looks like I should talk with ColorMunki to see if they have generated RGB profiles for use with an HP CMYK laser printer.

It sure would be nice to soft proof and print to my color laserjet from inside LR4.





 

[Alan Goldhammer]

If the HP information is correct, you should just be able to use ColorMunki to do an RGB profile rather than a CMYK profile and that would then be recognized by LR4 beta.  You indicate that there is a generic HP RGB profile so that indicates the driver would take a CM one.

[Nigel Johnson]

The HP printer does have 4 toner cartridges (CMYK).
The HP driver settings claimed it would send raw RGB to the printer.

Terry

Although your printer uses CMYK toners the printer driver (whilst possibly accepting CMYK information) will generally expect RGB information as this is what is supplied from most standard office applications and consumer grade image programmes. The printer can therefor be treated as an an RGB printer like most inkjets (which also are CMYK or CMYK-plus-additional-colours printers but whose printer drivers are rarely able to accept CMYK information).

Although you will be able to profile the printer and are likely to get better colour, expect some variation in prints made at different times as laser printers are sensitive to humidity (including the humidity level of the paper - think newly opened pack versus paper that has been in the printer for some time) and also temperature leading to variations in colour.

Regards
Nigel

[Terry Thrift]

Nigel: Yes. It would seem like I should be able to create an RGB profile for the HP laser.
I am certainly willing to accept some variation.
It is not a fine art printer.

Alan: I had a few email exchanges with ColorMunki support.  He responded promptly and courteously. However his base response was to not print to that printer from LR4 beta.
When pressed a little he did confirm that ColorMunki determines the colorspace by talking to the printer driver.  But he did not offer any details and he did not know how to adjust my printer driver to fool ColorMunki into creating an RGB profile. 

I'll try some more variations of driver settings in hopes on fooling ColorMunki.

Thanks for the input.

[Terry Thrift]

I figured out how to fool ColorMunki on the Mac to create an RGB output profile (instead of CMYK) for LR4 beta.

I'm still working on improving the results from the using the profile.
But at least I can choose to create RGB profiles!

From docs at the Apple developer site, the properties of each printer/driver are stored in "ppd" text files.

Within my printer's ppd file I changed the line
     "*DefaultColorSpace:   CMYK"
to
     "*DefaultColorSpace:   RGB"

Then I removed and re-added the printer to load the new ppd definition.

PS.
Before editing the ppd file it needs to be extracted from the compressed container.
After editing it run gzip to compress it again.

The ppd files seem to be stored inside compressed files named "PrinterModel.ppd.gz".
My printer's ppd file was inside the file "/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/resources/HP Color LaserJet CP2020d Series.gz"
For some reason this printer's file did not have ".ppd" in the name.