Thank you, Doug!
I reinstalled the (same latest) printer drivers once more, and the problem is now gone again. But I suspect it might come back, as this is no different from what I did before.
You are right that, when I assign a printer profile instead of AdobeRGB or sRGB (following Babel's filename), I get almost exactly the same degradation (blue too dark/towards magenta, green too dark, top row "faded", reds towards orange, and cyan patch much to dark/blue)! So this, indeed, seems to indicate that, somewhere in the process, this kind of profile mis-assignment is occurring--very hard to imagine we'd see the exact same set of degradations through any other issue or mechanism!
But, unfortunately, it is not because I wrongly attach a printer profile to my images, since:
- PS does not even offer me any printer profiles, when opening an RGB image without profile (seems to look only in the local Library path and my printer profiles are in the global one)
- When I forcefully assign a printer profile to a checker image while opening, I already see these exact color defects on the screen in PS (as one should expect), not just in the print output. When I get the wrong prints, the checker still looks perfect on the screen though.
- I get the same color cast problems when printing normal photos (imported from camera into LR, then choosing "Edit in PS" within LR) and these picture also look perfect on the screen and then show the same issues when printed.
- Henrik (his post from April 6) is showing the exact same color cast, also on real pictures. (See how the cyan in his example picture has turned dark blue and the green is dark and faded.)
- Why would the problem go away after reinstalling the printer drivers?
At this stage, I don't really know, where else to look. I am definitely checking these things before every print:
- Setting the right paper type in the printer driver dialog from within the PS print window
- Ditto for print quality (highest)
- The color management radio button is greyed out and "Colorsync" is selected (has always been like this for me when printing from PS)
- Selecting absolute colorimetric (for checker) or perceptual (for real pictures) in PS print window
- Selecting "PS manages colors"
- Selecting the right printer profile
I have anyhow never seen dE over 25 just from wrong paper types or print quality. My problem looks identical with printer profiles I created myself as with those downloaded from Hahnemuehle. So the profiles seem intact.
So I really think at some stage, PS or OSX assign the wrong profile, but I don't think it is in my control, but rather some bug. Maybe I should move my printer profiles from the global Library folder to my local one?
What is weird is that my issue seems to be the same as Henrik's, looking at his color defect examples, although we are now several major OSX and printer driver versions further along--as if some major bug never really got fixed.