I'm only interested in real answers to sensible questions.
Dear Mark,
Here is an excerpt of an email I exchanged with Dave Polashek, back in 2010 when I was the color engineer for the Gutenprint printing system, and I was tracing various issues which occurred in the color management on the Mac print path. Dave was extremely helpful, as I was trying to figure out where the issues lay. For context, Samplerasterprinter was some Apple sample code that created a fake printer, which I modded a bit to check the color flow without using ink. Later I found a way to hack the Mac's CUPS print system to do the same inspection task without needing to compile this piece of code.
The indented lines are mine.
As you can see, Dave considered the "Printer Manages Colors" to be "pretty well exercised" which in my book is what I would call "preferred". There were actually some minor issues here and many more on the other path, implicitly here because it was less exercised. I think the distribution of consumers/pros hasn't changed so much in 8 or so years, nor the API calls to apply color conversions, and would expect the printpaths to still enjoy the same popularity, complexity, and test priority, which is why I consider PMC to be the most reliable if not the best way to print..
I hope this was the level of detail you were expecting me to provide as evidence of my total ignorance of the topic at hand. Print system engineers are extremely interested in ensuring the correct the behavior of print systems, and they use a bunch of diagnostic tools, including here software like trick profiles and fake printers they mod themselves, and of course spectros which get used to check the actual prints.
Although the fact that I have a PhD virtually guarantees in your eyes that I am a total failure not only as a photographer but also as an engineer, maybe we can now decide that I have an opinion on this issue, you have one, they are not aligned but neither is necessarily absurd. And also, some of my wierdness concerning a topic recently discussed on the colorsync list stems from the fact that much alcohol was consumed since then, many braincells died and so I have forgotten most of the details that I knew about inkjet print preprocessing, while some other conversation participants never knew them.
Best Regards,
Edmund
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> I slightly modded sampleraster printer (sRGB in lieu of
> Generic RGB in ppd file) . Preliminary testing with
> trick profiles indicates that
>
> - "Printer Manages Color" works well from CS5 with any
> profile that can then be selected in the Snow Leopard
> printer dialog profile box being applied as convert, with
> the assigned original document profile correctly respected.
Right. That's a pretty well exercised code-path, with nothing especially tricky happening.
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