Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Colour Management => Topic started by: RHPS on November 07, 2012, 03:02:50 pm
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Since the release of CS6 I, like may others I am sure, have been disappointed that there is no obvious way to print with no color management. The Adobe Color Print Utility aims to compensate for this but in Windows at least it is far from perfect. I sometimes want to print a small image with no color management at a particular position on the paper. To do this with ACPU can be very frustrating since the margins, and the print scaling, appear to be arbitrarily fixed in the Windows version.
There was a workaround in CS5 of setting the document color space and the printer profile to AdobeRGB(1998). This was ("helpfully") disabled in CS6. It occurred to me that this workaround might be possible in CS6 if there were a profile that was identical to AdobeRGB(1998) but with a different name. This would allow printing from CS6 with a document profile and a printer profile that were the same in all but name.
To test this I have made a copy of the AdobeRGB(1998) profile and renamed it (using the Microsoft Color Management applet) to "Null.icc". (This was done in the Windows XP environment on my dual-boot system.) I then installed the "Null" profile in the Win7 environment. CS6 recognised the profile in Win7. I then used the workaround in CS6, assigning AdobeRGB(1998) to the document and using Null.icc as the printer profile.
I have only printed a small patch set with this set-up to compare it with the same set printed using ACPU. The measured Lab values for these patches are within measurement error for the two sets, suggesting that the workaround works.
Before I commit (waste?) any more time on this method can any experts on this forum point out why it should not work? I would love to return to the flexibility of printing with no color management from Photoshop and this, I hope, could be the way.
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The workaround doesn’t work in CS6. Even in CS5 it wasn't always reliable. You'll have to print elsewhere.
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My understanding of ACPU is that it was designed to print profile-making targets, nothing more, and not intended as a general printing substitute for the normal Print dialog in Photoshop. In any case, I'm finding that printing out of Lightroom 4 is at once easy and very satisfactory.
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Sorry for a dumb question, but can you explain what you mean by "print with no color management"? What's the difference between that and choosing "Printer manages colors" in the print dialogue? To my understanding, the latter means that Photoshop does no colour management.
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If you chose "Printer Manages Colors", the printer driver does exactly that, which is not "No Color Management" or "Color Management: OFF", because management is happening - by the driver rather than the application.
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No Color Management is supposed to send the RGB values directly to the driver 'as is' which isn't what Printer Manages Color does.
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No Color Management is supposed to send the RGB values directly to the driver 'as is' which isn't what Printer Manages Color does.
So what does setting 'printer manages color' do? (Presuming you also turn off color management in the printer dialog)
Brian A
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So what does setting 'printer manages color' do? (Presuming you also turn off color management in the printer dialog)
Brian A
What dialog are you talking about - the printer driver or the Photoshop Print dialog? If you select Color Management OFF in the Epson driver, the printer does not manage colour. If you allow the printer to manage colour in the Printer driver and you tell the Photoshop Print dialog that the Printer manages colour, then the printer driver will manage colour.
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As a canon user I find the 16-bit printing plugin useful for this. But if that's not an option for you, another option to consider is using QImage for this.
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What dialog are you talking about - the printer driver or the Photoshop Print dialog? If you select Color Management OFF in the Epson driver, the printer does not manage colour. If you allow the printer to manage colour in the Printer driver and you tell the Photoshop Print dialog that the Printer manages colour, then the printer driver will manage colour.
I am talking about setting the printer to manage color in the Photoshop pirinter dialog, and also turning off color management in the print driver dialog.
Brian A
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This causes problems - there has been much discussion about it, for example: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/solving.shtml (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/solving.shtml) and the subsequent article: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/printers/adobe_color_printer_utility_application.shtml (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/printers/adobe_color_printer_utility_application.shtml)
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This causes problems - there has been much discussion about it, for example: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/solving.shtml (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/solving.shtml) and the subsequent article: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/printers/adobe_color_printer_utility_application.shtml (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/printers/adobe_color_printer_utility_application.shtml)
Thanks Mark, I had read these articles a while back, but both refer specifically to Mac OS and Photoshop and there is quite a bit more conmunication between a Mac OS and the driver than there is under Windows. It is difficult to double profile under Mac OS, for example, but quite simple under Windows.
Brian A
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This causes problems - there has been much discussion about it, for example: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/solving.shtml (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/solving.shtml) and the subsequent article: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/printers/adobe_color_printer_utility_application.shtml (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/printers/adobe_color_printer_utility_application.shtml)
Thanks - I'll read those articles later (just off to work now).
To my understanding (up till now, at any rate), "Printer manages colours" means Photoshop doesn't, if you see what I mean, and in Epson printer drivers at any rate, there's an option to turn off all colour management, and the manual say that it means "no colour management or adjustment".
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Thanks - I'll read those articles later (just off to work now).
To my understanding (up till now, at any rate), "Printer manages colours" means Photoshop doesn't, if you see what I mean, and in Epson printer drivers at any rate, there's an option to turn off all colour management, and the manual say that it means "no colour management or adjustment".
Yes Simon, the Epson manual covers what happens in Epson printers, but there are two other critical components to a colour-managed or non-colour managed workflow: the image editing application and the computer's CMS. Adobe disabled Photoshop 's "No Color Management" option because it was causing a number of systemic problems, particularly on Mac, but when they did this, they did it cross-platform. So you have the option within Photoshop for either the application to manage colour or the printer driver to manage colour. If you select the printer driver to manage colour, but then disable colour management in the printer driver, it doesn't necessarily mean "no colour management" is truly happening, because there is still the CMS and there is still the fact that an algorithm of some kind is needed to translate image file colour numbers into numbers the printer-driver can use for managing ink flow; that apparently is where the outcomes become unpredictable and as Mark Dubovoy discovered, unsatisfactory, at least on the Mac. I don't know off hand whether Windows CMS manages this better than Colorsync because I haven't printed with a Windows operating system since I converted to Mac OSX. But the other question underlying this whole thread is why one would want to print with no colour management altogether, except for printing profile-making targets, which the ACPU handles well - my experience with it.
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I don't know off hand whether Windows CMS manages this better than Colorsync because I haven't printed with a Windows operating system since I converted to Mac OSX. But the other question underlying this whole thread is why one would want to print with no colour management altogether, except for printing profile-making targets, which the ACPU handles well - my experience with it.
I think the Windows CMS ("WCS" - Windows Color System) is not so tightly integrated, and (as I understand) does no behind-the-scenes colour management. In other words: colour space mapping is done by WCS only on request from the application. Applications that don't explicitly ask for colour management (by invoking WCS APIs, or the predecessor ICM APIs) don't get it.
If my understanding is correct, if you set the print dialogue option in Photoshop to "Printer Manages Colors" and set the Epson printer driver parameter to "No color adjustment" then Windows doesn't do any colour space adjustment either. However, I can't test it at the moment, so I'm ready to be corrected!
Edit: I'd forgotten that I'd previously found this Microsoft reference, from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536554%28VS.85%29.aspx (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536554%28VS.85%29.aspx):
On a fundamental level, almost any application should be able to adjust color automatically so that its output looks the same on different monitors and printers. WCS 1.0 provides a set of functions to deliver this kind of color management that is transparent to a user and requires little overhead in the application.
In other words, Windows provides colour management functions for applications that ask for it.
Another reference saying much the same: http://www.naturescapes.net/docs/index.php/articles/379 (http://www.naturescapes.net/docs/index.php/articles/379)
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But the other question underlying this whole thread is why one would want to print with no colour management altogether, except for printing profile-making targets, which the ACPU handles well - my experience with it.
The ACPU is "OK" for printing targets in Windows, and I am very pleased that Adobe gave it to us; but, it doesn't quite do what you might want/expect in Windows. Namely, there is no way that I have found to position the image on the paper, and the printed image is reduced in size. Not a big deal for printing targets, but annoying all the same.
As for why anyone would want to print with NCM other than for printing targets, I use it for diagnostic and QC purposes which do not require full profiling targets. Having the flexibility of image scaling/positioning in PS would make life just a little bit simpler.
Coming back to my original question, I think I found the answer in this much earlier thread http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=43352.60 (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=43352.60) In that thread Eric Chan said "True, the workaround (assign, etc.) requires you to choose one of the builtin profiles (like Adobe RGB). Otherwise you won't get the desired NULL transform". This is a distinction that I had never seen mentioned explicitly before, or since. And, of course, it's not possible in CS6 to set the document and printer to the same profile, so it's back to square one.
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The ACPU is "OK" for printing targets in Windows, and I am very pleased that Adobe gave it to us; but, it doesn't quite do what you might want/expect in Windows. Namely, there is no way that I have found to position the image on the paper, and the printed image is reduced in size. Not a big deal for printing targets, but annoying all the same.
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I have not observed (using CS5 on a Mac) that ACPU reduces the size of the printed image. That can indeed be quite a big deal for printing targets if your target measurement hardware and software requires that the target print be of a specific size so the patches get read-in correctly.
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It's only 4% undersize, which is not a problem for me. The placement of the image right up in the top LH corner is more annoying.
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Why print with no color management? One reason: to clean a specific print head nozzle. I sometimes print large patches of specific RGB numbers to purge specific inks after a less-than-perfect nozzle check rather than go through a cleaning cycle, which is harder on the print head.
I have found three ways to do this that visually look the same; maybe they wouldn't to a spectrophotometer.
1. ACPU
2. Lightroom 4: set the color mangement profile to sRGB (or whatever the image profile is, so no actual conversion takes place). Printer driver color management off.
3. PS CS6: select Photoshop Manages Color, assign Printer Profile to "Epson RGB" (again, same as image profile). Printer driver color management off. CS6 will tell you this is not supported, but it will let you print and the results look the same to me as the two other methods.
What I have found does not work is turning color management off in both Lightroom 4 and the print driver, as others have also observed; thank you for the answer, it had me baffled! This is on a PC, Windows 7 64-bit.
For my purposes this works. If I were printing profiling targets I would probably stick with ACPU.
LexJet also notes that ACPU reduces the print file size: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32cKt3Wa1SE
Lastly, I also sometimes print a purge sheet with all eight ink colors if I have not used the printer for a week or so. I found purge images at inkjetcarts.us
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Why print with no color management?
To gang up more than one rendering or profile per page. You want to see on one print, RelCol and Perceptual from the same profile.
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I have not observed (using CS5 on a Mac) that ACPU reduces the size of the printed image.
I've seen it on Mac. I don't know what exactly triggers it.
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I've seen it on Mac. I don't know what exactly triggers it.
I suspect it has something to do with page margins and printer margins. Same thing happens if you print a letter-sized PDF on letter-sized paper with Adobe Reader. By default it wants to fit the entire PDF page within the printable area of the paper, which requires a slight size reduction (even though it's unnecessary since the part of the PDF that would have gotten 'clipped' is just whitespace).
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To gang up more than one rendering or profile per page. You want to see on one print, RelCol and Perceptual from the same profile.
Definitely this. I loved being able to do this. I hate paper waste, but waste a lot of time loading scrap sheets as cut sheets.
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To gang up more than one rendering or profile per page. You want to see on one print, RelCol and Perceptual from the same profile.
QImage can easily do this.
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QImage can easily do this.
Right and it allows that with its color management on.
On the other request; Qimage knows three settings for color management: Qimage CM on, Let Printer CM, QImage CM off. The difference between the last two is that with Let Printer CM, the assigned profile of the image is still kept in the data transferred to the driver, with Qimage CM off the assigned profile is taken out. As Windows does not interfere unasked the whole workflow is transparent for different CM methods including profile target printing.
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Met vriendelijke groet, Ernst
http://www.pigment-print.com/spectralplots/spectrumviz_1.htm
470+ inkjet paper white spectral plots, November 2012:
rearranged categories, Permajet + MediaJet brands added.
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. But the other question underlying this whole thread is why one would want to print with no colour management altogether, except for printing profile-making targets, which the ACPU handles well - my experience with it.
Coming into this thread very late I can mention that some people who need to print with NCM are generating colorized digital negatives for making prints with alternative processes such as palladium printing, gum bichromate and so forth. This is very much the case for individuals using Mark Nelson's Precision Digital Negative system.
http://www.precisiondigitalnegatives.com/
Don Bryant
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My understanding of ACPU is that it was designed to print profile-making targets, nothing more, and not intended as a general printing substitute for the normal Print dialog in Photoshop.
Agree.
In any case, I'm finding that printing out of Lightroom 4 is at once easy and very satisfactory.
Also agree. I infer that you are not saying that LR4 can be used to make profile-making targets.
Are the following correct?
- LR4 can not be used to make profile-making targets
- because there is no way to turn off color management.
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I don't see any reason to use Lightroom for printing printer profiling targets when the ACPU was designed to be a safe and reliable way of doing this. I've never felt the need to try using Lightroom for this purpose so I can't comment on whether certain ways of tweaking it would do the job just as well. But why make life difficult when there is a simple solution freely available to us?
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The ACPU is "OK" for printing targets in Windows, and I am very pleased that Adobe gave it to us; but, it doesn't quite do what you might want/expect in Windows. Namely, there is no way that I have found to position the image on the paper, and the printed image is reduced in size. Not a big deal for printing targets, but annoying all the same.
If you really want the output of ACPU on Windows-7 to be a certain size (such as ... perhaps ... for an iSis), I've found that I can open
MyTargetForPrintingByAcpu.tif
in Photoshop, and use "Edit + Image Size" and then change the dimensions to be larger. I found it to be a trial-and-error process, but I could get the printed output from ACPU to be about anything I wanted it to be.
8.9" width often worked well. ACPU doesn't seem to care if you are printing an 8.9 x 11.6" document on a sheet of letter-size 8.5 x 11" paper. There generally was plenty of room on the bottom for the iSis to accomplish paper-handling.
The following algebra was helpful:
a c
- = -
b d
In the attached, note that you want to specify the resampling as "Nearest Neighbor (preserve hard edges)" to avoid dithering. It might do the same to uncheck the "Resample Image" checkbox.
TMI?
However, I've found the iSis with either i1Profiler or ColorPort seems capable of measuring the black calibration bar just above the actual patches, and from there figure out how to re-proportionalize the widths and heights. With PMP5, I've hit alignment problems ... off by one ... unless I use "Chart with Barcode" and let the software disregard/override the parameters in the iSis_INFO line (or leave out the iSis_INFO line entirely).
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I don't see any reason to use Lightroom for printing printer profiling targets when the ACPU was designed to be a safe and reliable way of doing this.
Sorry, I guess I was "clear as mud". I just wanted to confirm that it would be inappropriate to try to use LR4 for profile-making-targets. My understanding is that there is no way to turn off color managment in LR4.
Correct?
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Are the following correct?
- LR4 can not be used to make profile-making targets
- because there is no way to turn off color management.
Correct (there's a hack which isn't reliable depending on the version of OS X).