Canon Pro-1000 has sudden change of color output

[PTKen]

I am experiencing this issue currently with six Canon Pro-1000 printers on Catalina. I delete a printer, re-add it and it fixes the color, but then it reverts back to poor color.

Mac OS: 10.15.7
Canon Print Driver: 22.20.0.0
Pro-1000 Firmware: 3.010

Has anyone figured out yet what the cause is? Or more importantly what the solution is?

Do we need to upgrade the OS from Catalina?

Thank you!

[Doug Gray]

The Pro1000 has an calibration feature designed to align their OEM profiles with whatever printer paper you use. While a nice feature for most that use OEM profiles, it's a problem with custom profiles. Running the paper calibration will change the printer color output if using custom profiles so you need to make new profiles after running a calibration. I disable this feature using only the OEM default calibration. Can't tell if this problem affects the OP but might be of interest to anyone making custom profiles.

[miemo]

I'm glad Google brought me here, was thinking I was going nuts with the sudden color shifts eventhough I hadn't changed anything on the system. Have been debugging this and doing test prints for way too long already… hours & euros wasted, nerves wrecked.

Experiencing same exact issues described earlier in the thread, especially seen in blues which turn into way too dark & way too satured. Also noticed a very distinct sepia toning in pure B&W images which wasn't there earlier with custom profiles even without the forced B&W-setting in printer settings. Was able to get the tones correct with forcing the printing to B&W only, but again that wasn't needed earlier.

On macOS 11.6.1 here, printing from Lightroom Classic 11.0. Guess I'll need to reinstall the printer drivers once more, cross fingers and hope this fixes it for a while. But god damn this is just utter bullshit that we need to deal with this kind of stuff with expensive pro-gear. Seems it's all holding together with duct tape and hail marys…

[miemo]

Just reporting the latest updates:

1) simple reinstall of the driver didn't fix anything
2) hard manual removal of everything related to Canon printer drivers & installing drivers again did the trick, colors now back to normal

Come to think of it, should've tried a middle-of-the-road option as well of just removing the printer from the System Preferences first before venturing into option the nuclear option 😅 In option #2 manually removed Canon printer related stuff from under /Library/Application Support/ + /Library/Preferences/ + /Library/Printers/ and all the same under the user folder as well.

[drb]

Just reporting the latest updates:

1) simple reinstall of the driver didn't fix anything
2) hard manual removal of everything related to Canon printer drivers & installing drivers again did the trick, colors now back to normal

Come to think of it, should've tried a middle-of-the-road option as well of just removing the printer from the System Preferences first before venturing into option the nuclear option 😅 In option #2 manually removed Canon printer related stuff from under /Library/Application Support/ + /Library/Preferences/ + /Library/Printers/ and all the same under the user folder as well.

Not sure if it was the same issue, but a couple of months ago I had a problem with the colors changing on my Canon Pro-1000 after doing a MacOS upgrade.  Reinstalling the driver alone didn't fix it.  Reinstalling the driver and then deleting the printer and adding it back did fix it.

[Doug Gray]

A recent Win 10 OS upgrade caused my Pro1000 to stop accessing the printer. I had to delete all the driver files and reinstall. Most interesting is that the color shifts I had been seeing in Dec. and Jan. completely reversed aside from the warmup shift I see between the first print and immediate second print. It's a small shift that increases a bit the longer it had been since I previously used the printer. Very small after 1 hr to somewhat larger after 24 hrs (.05 dE to .2 dE). Very stable from second print onward. I also checked the OEM profiles that were re-installed and they are identical to the originals.

I then printed a test patch series on Pro Platinum using the factory defaults with the OEM profile and got a very similar result from 2019:

  Full gamut ave. dE2k 1.19, Low saturation gamut ave. dE2k .96

Then I ran the Color Calibration and repeated the print which improved color accuracy.

  Full gamut ave. dE2k .91, Low saturation gamut ave. dE2k .75

This is quite good considering the OEM profiles are made on different instruments (I use an i1isis XL 2)

Note that when you do a color calibration for one of their papers, it assigns updated values to all other papers that haven't been color calibrated. Once a paper is color calibrated, the value sticks for that paper. So, for instance, if I calibrate against Pro Luster, it will update other papers but not the Pro Platinum because I had already calibrated it.

The printer print all the calibration settings for each paper type when you select "Print advanced paper settings" on the printer's menu.

The problem is that if you create custom profiles for different papers then re-calibrate it will change all other papers you haven't calibrated. So the optimal approach is to calibrate against only one paper. Then create custom profiles for all the papers you use. After that you should be able to get the best results out of those papers and profiles by simply color calibrating against the same paper type. It will update everything for any drift the printer has experienced. This should also work when you have to replace the print head.

[Prospero]

Hi All,

Thought I provide some additional info, as I was still not able to resolve this issue (which I described in more detail in my post from Feb. 2021:

https://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=133310.msg1207968#msg1207968 ).

To recap: Every couple of weeks, my installation breaks and the colors get thrown off completely, way too saturated (see examples in my original post).  This is not a small deviation, as you might get from wrong internal printer calibration or picking a profile for a different paper, as the deviation is at least a dE of 25.

To my biggest frustration, the problem still prevails, even though I moved to a brand new Mac end of Jan. (MacBook Pro M1 Max, running all the Monterey sub-versions that came out since then).

I was very careful to not migrate to the new machine by copying over any binaries or configuration files from my old MacBook, but really do this as a 100% clean new install, downloading all applications, drivers, etc. from the manufacturer websites again, installing and configuring everything from scratch.

We can also really exclude any one-off mishandling of my part, because I have now been doing the exact same things to print my test images many dozen times, and they only involve a couple of simple steps:
- Load test image (TIFF encoded in ProPhoto) in PS
- While loading, tell PS to assign the ProPhoto profile
- Go to PS print menu and check all printer settings (paper type, print quality, etc.)
- Select right paper profile
- Select "PS manages colors"
- Choose "absolute colorimetric" intent
- Go!

Also, once the setup is broken, it is broken consistently, until I reinstall the printer, which is really the only thing that fixes it!

At this stage, I can only suspect it is either due to the macOS updates or the PS updates, as I don't know what other thing would changes every couple of weeks.

I am really surprised that not more people are suffering from it, as I did a complete clean new installation of my entire Mac.

Thanks in advance for sharing any additional insights that might have emerged.

Markus