I recently moved my Canon ipf8400 about a hundred miles away and 2500 feet higher and wanted to make sure it had survived. My initial test print using Andrew Rodney's (digitaldog) "Adobe RGB (1998)" test file looked OK and matched my calibrated Dell UH30 monitor well. However, a few weeks later I watched his excellent video advocating the use of wide gamut color spaces from which to print from PSCC2014 and wanted to test it out in LR6; you can find his video
here. After converting a copy of his "Printer Gamut Test File" to sRGB in PSCC2014, I saved it as a 16-bit tiff along with his original, imported them into LR6, ensuring that I was in the ProPhoto working space. When I printed them with
Relative Intent, I could immediately see the differences he discusses including the ProPhoto enhancements to saturation in the cyans and yellows, the smoothing of the magentas and other colors, as well as the improved shadow detail but for some reason I lost the blues in the ProPhoto version (outlined in red), but the sRGB blues looked OK (panels A and B). Note the "black" ring around the upper blue ball and the near black lower ball on the far right.
The same thing happened printing the same file from PS. When I printed with
Perceptual Intent, as Andrew recommended, I still saw the same noted differences as before, but now Bill's blue balls looked much better. The PI sRGB looked about the same (panel C), while the PI ProPhoto version looked more like those described by Andrew (panel D outlined in red), not quite, but better.
Please note this dreadful composite was created as follows. Not having a controlled viewing environment, I scanned each print at 300 dpi with 24-bit color on my Brother laser printer. Each file was saved as a png, then imported into PSCC2014 and combined, annotated, flattened, reduced, and saved as a max quality jpeg. Banding and slight colors shifts are artifacts of the scanning process, but my gestalt on viewing the composite is that it fairly approximates what I see in the prints.
In my second post, I show you screen captures of the LR6 Print module for each of the files and the two different rendering intents (see file names). For all of them, you can see the differences in saturation (less in sRGB, more in ProPhoto), same with shadow detail, but
the black ring around the blues is missing! Again, some very subtle differences, but in essence as I have represented it. FWIW, these captures were all PNG files with no adjustments.
In my third post, I show the ProPhoto-Relative rendering screen capture and the preview that comes up on my Canon ipf8400: it clearly shows the black ring around the blues. My conclusion is that it's real: I see it, my printer software "sees it" and my printer prints it. I could print in PI, which I do all the time, but I want to understand this phenomenon, if possible. Maybe, I've screwed up somehow, but I don't think so. I am surmising that it may have something to do with emissivity, reflectivity, and how the different rendering intents are mapped at the time of output, but I am not sure and I would like to be able to obtain the same results as Andrew Rodney. In short:
Am I missing something?
PS Win 8.1-64 OS, Nvidia GeForce GTX 780
