Putting "Printer Manages Color" under Color Management

[Doug Gray]

From time to time various people, including some professional photographers and high end printers, find that they prefer the results of using "Printer Manages Color" over Photoshop (or other application) manages color. It is, in fact, not uncommon that "Printer Manages Color" makes very different prints. My Canon 9500 II radically shifts colors. In many areas it increases green to cyan saturation levels up to 20 dE and significantly bumps up luminance. The results are pretty garish under bright light (500 lux) but not unappealing at moderate room lighting levels of, say 120 lux.

The problem of course is that there is no way to really tell exactly what the print is going to look like when working in Photoshop. Worse, if you find that you really like a print made that way you are out of luck if you try to print the same image on a different printer. Especially from another manufacturer.

But there is one way to put this under color management which makes it possible to print with the unique characteristics of one printer on different printers, including printers made in the future but it requires the ability to make custom profiles.

Here's how to do it with I1Profiler.

Make a new profile but, instead of disabling color management, just save the target tif image then assign it to the same color space used to make the print you like. This is usually either sRGB or Adobe RGB. Then select the same device driver settings that were used to make the "Printer Manages Color" print. Print the target and make a new profile.

Now, assign that profile to the original images you desire to convert into the colors made by "Printer Manages Color."  Then convert the image to a larger color space using Relative Colorimetric Intent. ProPhoto RGB will always work fine but you should always be working in 16 bits.

You can now print the image using "Photoshop Manages Color" normally and selecting relative colorimetric. This will quite precisely duplicate the effect of using "Printer Manages Color" and the same print can be made with a future printer using relative colorimetric to retain the look of a prior printer's print.

This approach, while providing a way to make a colorimetric image file of the "Printer Manages" transform, cannot be used like a normal profile. One must follow the machinations of assigning the special profile then converting to a normal working space wide enough to hold the image gamut. The image in Photoshop would then be the same as what a soft proof would be.

Theoretically, a normal profile is possible where the Perceptual Intent ICC profile tables incorporates the transform and then folks could use that profile normally. Perceptual intent would produce the same print as a "Printer Manages Color" would. However, this can't be done with I1PRofiler. There may be a way with Argyll and clearly would be by modifying the source code. Graeme would know.

[Mark D Segal]

Clever, but the whole purpose of "Printer Manages Color" is to keep things REAL EASY for those who can't be bothered with colour management. If one is going to go to all this effort to obtain inter-device consistency with Printer Manages Color, why not just use a normal ICC colour-managed workflow that is premised on this very objective and rely on one's image editing application under soft-proof to get the "look" one wants? This is a philosophic point - not arguing about the technicalities.

[Doug Gray]

Clever, but the whole purpose of "Printer Manages Color" is to keep things REAL EASY for those who can't be bothered with colour management. If one is going to go to all this effort to obtain inter-device consistency with Printer Manages Color, why not just use a normal ICC colour-managed workflow that is premised on this very objective and rely on one's image editing application under soft-proof to get the "look" one wants? This is a philosophic point - not arguing about the technicalities.

Well yeah!  But there are some few that seem color management knowledgeable yet apparently can't seem to get the prints they like except by using "Printer Manages." So this if for people like Ctien. It does offer one advantage. Reproducible results on different printers.

[Mark D Segal]

............... So this if for people like Ctien. ...............

Expect a storm Doug!  :-)

[Simon Garrett]

I'm struggling to get the point of the first post here, but maybe that's because things are very different with the Epson printers I've used with colour management.

With "Photoshop manages colours" I select the printer profile in PS, and set the printer to make no colour adjustment.  On Epson printers that typically means setting "Mode" to "Off (no colour adjustment)", or sometimes on older printers to "ICM" (Image Colour Management) and then a sub-setting of "off".

With "Printer manages colours", PS sends the image unaltered (i.e. in Working Space) to the printer, and I set the printer to "ICM" mode, and in sub-settings set the input colour space (to PS's Working Space) and choose the printer profile.

The end result in both cases should be (and is) very similar.  In one case I'm using PS's colour rendering engine and in the other I'm using Epson's.  But both should produce the same result, and in my experience of several Epson printers, the results are near identical.  Certainly not 20 dE differences in saturation or luminance. 

If Canon's colour management engine produces such major differences, it would suggest that it's completely dysfunctional.

Or am I missing something?

[Rhossydd]

and I set the printer to "ICM" mode, and in sub-settings set the input colour space (to PS's Working Space) and choose the printer profile.
.........
Or am I missing something?

This is a discussion about what happens if you don't select ICM in the driver and leave it one of the 'auto' modes and have no input at all with the printer's colour management.

[GWGill]

Theoretically, a normal profile is possible where the Perceptual Intent ICC profile tables incorporates the transform and then folks could use that profile normally. Perceptual intent would produce the same print as a "Printer Manages Color" would. However, this can't be done with I1PRofiler. There may be a way with Argyll and clearly would be by modifying the source code. Graeme would know.

Hmm. Maybe I'm not getting what you are trying to do, but the normal way you would emulate the behaviour of an output device is to profile it, and then use that profile as the source profile in a color managed workflow.

[Simon Garrett]

This is a discussion about what happens if you don't select ICM in the driver and leave it one of the 'auto' modes and have no input at all with the printer's colour management.

Understood!

[digitaldog]

Expect a storm Doug!  :-)

+1 to a degree. Some of his comments however imply not soft proofing, not picking a rendering intent and not using a full color managed path is going to produce a 'better' print. And with less than ideal output profiles and poor display calibration if any, and without perhaps some output specific edits based on doing all this correctly, that's possible but NOT recommended.

[Doug Gray]

Hmm. Maybe I'm not getting what you are trying to do, but the normal way you would emulate the behaviour of an output device is to profile it, and then use that profile as the source profile in a color managed workflow.

Graeme,
That is exactly what's happening. When the special profile that is made from printing the target assigned to sRGB space is assigned to a photo in sRGB space. Then, when printing on a different printer conversions occur in Photoshop like this:

sRGB initially assigned then AtoB1 with the special profile made in sRGB space then BtoA1 with the output profile of the target printer. Aside from assigning sRGB initially, this is standard color management workflow.

This works because the AtoB1 (RelCol) tables reflect the perceptual mapping that occurs when printing sRGB images directly letting the printer manage color. The problem is that the BtoA0 (Perc) will not. Rather they will reflect the perceptual mapping baked into the I1Profiler which is quite different.

The problem is people are not used to doing this. Here's how I view the problem.

If the manufacturer wanted to they could simply provide normal ICC profiles that were made with constrained colorspaces. For instance, a profile constrained to sRGB could map the PCS using Perceptual in exactly the same way as letting the printer manage color handles sRGB directly. They could also provide one for Adobe RGB source images.  The difference here is that these profiles would be made with the source gamut, either sRGB or Adobe RGB, known. However, this would expand and complicate things because profiles for these constrained spaces would have to be labeled for use with the associated, constrained RGB space.

It would be nice if the hidden, printer manages, perceptual mapping from an RGB constrained space could somehow be created for the BtoA0 tables. Then one could achieve exactly the same results using normal, app based, color management. It would also provide normal soft proofing.

[Doug Gray]

+1 to a degree. Some of his comments however imply not soft proofing, not picking a rendering intent and not using a full color managed path is going to produce a 'better' print. And with less than ideal output profiles and poor display calibration if any, and without perhaps some output specific edits based on doing all this correctly, that's possible but NOT recommended.

Well, not much you can do when people choose to avoid color management. They get what they get. It might be perfectly fine for them but it will be specific to that printer/paper. Change printers and they will often get a different result and there is little they can do about it.

[TonyW]

Well, not much you can do when people choose to avoid color management. They get what they get. It might be perfectly fine for them but it will be specific to that printer/paper. Change printers and they will often get a different result and there is little they can do about it.

From memory Ctein said that printer manages colour would only work satisfactorily on a Mac and fir some reason that currently escapes me not on Windows. 

TBH I could not understand why this may be the case although I could see that colour management may require more user input to make sure it is being used by Windows OS. 

Other than that is there any reason to expect a difference between Mac or Windows OS?

[Doug Gray]

From memory Ctein said that printer manages colour would only work satisfactorily on a Mac and fir some reason that currently escapes me not on Windows. 

TBH I could not understand why this may be the case although I could see that colour management may require more user input to make sure it is being used by Windows OS. 

Other than that is there any reason to expect a difference between Mac or Windows OS?

IIRC, there was a discussion with Ctien and an Adobe guru where it was stated that Macs allow "Printer Manages" to use either Adobe RGB or sRGB while Windows always converts RGB spaces to sRGB and his images were in Adobe RGB. This may be true in the specific case of letting the Windows driver print using its defaults but isn't  generally true for all Windows printers and driver options. Garrett pointed this out earlier in this thread.  You can do color management in the driver by selecting the printer profile, incoming RGB colorspace, and intent on many Epson printers. I have tested this on the Epson 9800 and ICM color management in the driver works perfectly.

[digitaldog]

IIRC, there was a discussion with Ctien and an Adobe guru where it was stated that Macs allow "Printer Manages" to use either Adobe RGB or sRGB while Windows always converts RGB spaces to sRGB and his images were in Adobe RGB.

That was Dave Polaschek of Adobe, he's the engineer on the PS team who handles printing. All his comments at the time can be found here:
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2015/07/andrew-rodney-on-the-importance-of-custom-printer-profiles.html
Specifically (and the bottom line):

Picking "Printer Manages Colors" on Windows guarantees that your color data will be converted to sRGB. We could adopt XPS printing to get around that, but there are many new and exciting bugs waiting to be found by the first application to head down that path.

On Mac, Picking "Vendor Color Management" and "Adobe RGB" does not mean the color data will automatically be converted to Adobe RGB. It means that untagged color data will be treated as Adobe RGB. When I last discussed this with the Apple printing engineers, I got a long explanation of when color conversions will happen, and the printer driver gets a chance to say to the OS "Yes, I can use color data in that color space" or "No, please convert that color data to XXXXX profile for me" (where XXXXX is the default profile for the printer, which you can set in ColorSync Utility.app).

When using "Printer Manages Colors" on Mac OS X, with a printer driver that says "Yes, send the color data as-is" when asked about what the application is offering to print, that data will be passed to the driver without conversion. I've done this with CIELAB data. I don't believe Epson's drivers will accept CIELAB, but when last I investigated (when the x900 printers shipped), they would accept ProPhoto RGB when using "Printer Manages Colors." There was only one conversion of the color data to the printer's final profile, and that was done by the driver.

All else being equal, fewer conversions between color spaces is preferable.

I still think using "Photoshop Manages Colors" is preferable if you take the time to construct an optimal profile, have a challenging document to print, and can manage to do everything correctly. But the results from using "Printer Manages Colors," especially if you are using papers supported by your printer vendor, are extremely close to optimal, and most users should at least give that a try and look at the results before investing in the hardware needed, plus the time needed to build a good color profile.

[TonyW]

Thanks Doug, I did not remember that it was sRGB conversion.

Andrew thanks for the link I had not seen this before today

[Doug Gray]

I came up with this to display the rather large color shifts that the Canon 9500 II makes using Printer Manages Color. Graphs relative to a* and b* for a given L* value show vectors that point from the requested color to the actual printed color. These all started with colors that were in sRGB space as well as in the printer gamut at 10 unit intervals of a* and b*.

The left side shows L* change for a given a*,b* coordinate while the right side shows the hue/saturation shift which is from the requested a*,b* to the printed a*,b*

Of particular note is that the Canon brightens up the image. A LOT!. It also significantly shifts colors. Generally increasing the cyan and cyan/green saturation but decreasing that of the purples. Also it's curious the shifts that are made to the blues where the hue angle increases and decreases within a very small range. The Canon Printer Manages also strongly shifts the purples toward the blue, and less purplish. It's a really big shift. Shows up in photos where the "blue" sky becomes more blue/cyan with less red tint in it.

Compare this to the subtle changes that a custom profile from I1Profiler makes in Perceptual using Photoshop Manages Color. As expected, color saturation isn't increased and is only decreased near the gamut edges where Perceptual is blended smoothly rather than clipping suddenly.

Updated with results of Epson 9800 Printer Manages chart added.

[nirpat89]

This might be a simplistic point (that's all I am capable of when it comes to color management,) but since paper profiling is normally done from an application managed workflow, whether through X-rite or ACPU or by fooling Photoshop a la Doug Gray, why would a "printer managed" printing of the actual image using the same profile be better than "Photoshop managed."  Or should be even considered? 

What am I missing?

:Niranjan.

[Doug Gray]

I've added images showing how prints vary when using Printer Manages Color with the Epson 9800 and Canon 9800. Papers used were Epson Glossy Prem. Photo and Canon Pro Platinum.

Shown are images of standard colorchecker and neutral tone patches as well as the classic Kodak PDI image.

[Doug Gray]

This might be a simplistic point (that's all I am capable of when it comes to color management,) but since paper profiling is normally done from an application managed workflow, whether through X-rite or ACPU or by fooling Photoshop a la Doug Gray, why would a "printer managed" printing of the actual image using the same profile be better than "Photoshop managed."  Or should be even considered? 

What am I missing?

:Niranjan.

Some people prefer Printer Manages color to normal ICC managed printing. So this provides a mechanism to transform an image such that it can be printed using ICC profile workflow but reproduce the printed image the same way it would be printed using Printer Manages. It may well be that newer printers do a better job but the 9500 pushes both luminance and saturation quite a bit. The 9800 pushes luminance but only about half as much as the 9500 but saturation is less affected.

I printed the three Kodak images as described and let a couple people select the one they liked best. They chose the one printed using standard ICC Photoshop Manages Color but found them all fairly similar.

Note that the posted images are in Adobe RGB though the originals had been converted to sRGB first. Adobe RGB is required because the 9500 printer manages increases saturation beyond sRGB.

[Chris Kern]

How many photographers other than Ctein argue that prints turn out better under printer-managed color than under application-manged color?  I understand some people are happy with the results they get when they turn over control to their printers, but unless you believe you're better off that way, this approach seems to me more complicated than setting up a color-managed application workflow.  (Which ain't that complicated, wot?)

If one is going to go to all this effort to obtain inter-device consistency with Printer Manages Color, why not just use a normal ICC colour-managed workflow that is premised on this very objective and rely on one's image editing application under soft-proof to get the "look" one wants?

This, I think, is the essential point.  From my perspective, there's more to soft-proofing than getting the colors right.  When you transfer an image from a high-dynamic-range transmissive computer display to a low-dynamic-range reflective medium like paper, adjustments other than color accuracy may be required to make it look the way you want.  At least, that's been my experience, printing from Lightroom and using the simulate paper and ink option to see the effect of the migration between media.