"Solved"? I'm not so sure about that. We have been running Mojave on our MACs since its 10.14.6 release and it has been running very smoothly. Colour and B&W prints have been accurate. However, since new features in LightRoom and PhotoShop were released which are not supported by or available in Mojave, we felt it was time to explore an "upgrade" to Big Sur. So, out of an abundance of caution, we "upgraded" only one of our MACs to Big Sur. This immediately broke the PhotoShop and LightRoom Classic print pipeline from that MAC. When we printed from it the result looked like prints made without the use of any ICC profile. However, prints from Print Tool and ImageNest were perfect. So, this seemed to be an issue between Adobe and Apple. At the same time I read accounts from others who had run into ColorSync related issues after moving to Big Sur. Apparently ICC profiles were hidden i.e. unavailable etc. We never had that issue. Our profiles were listed but were being ignored by PhotoShop and LightRoom - but not other apps.
After a couple of weeks of this and printing only from Print Tool or ImageNest from that MAC, we decided to move it to Monterey because I had read that it had solved some of the ColorSync related issues encountered by others. After doing so we printed our standard image test file from PhotoShop. That test file has been used by us for several years. So we know it well. It consists of a collection of various colour and B&W images and scales. The print from Photoshop immediately appeared as though our profiles were being picked up again. BUT, two images were inaccurate which begged closer inspection. One of the images in the test file is a pic of a lady with deeply tanned skin tone. The skin was clearly more brown/red - cooler than the correct print or the screen display. Also, the greens in another image were cooler. In fact the entire file appeared very slightly cooler. This was highly unusual.
So, we printed the file from Print Tool and ImageNest again. This time, the print from Print Tool matched the result from PhotoShop i.e. cooler with browner red skin tone in that one portion of the file and ever so slightly cooler overall. The print from ImageNest was a complete failure. It was not picking up the ICC profiles or was not reading them correctly. The result was an oversaturated magenta laden mess. So, first, ImageNest is apparently not yet supported by Monterey. More importantly to us, though, was this new colour discrepancy in our standard test file which was apparently created by Monterey. So next we printed the same test file twice to the same printer on the same paper - once from a Monterey MAC and next from a Mojave Mac. The print from the Monterey MAC showed the cooler midtone to deep red and the print from the Mojave Mac was normal.
Further to this, we ran 2 more test prints from a file which is comprised of a 60 patch colour scale and 51 patch grey scale. We also run these tests regularly to gain numerical comparisons of profiles and printers in addition to visual comparisons using the aforementioned image based test file. The scales were printed first from the Mojave Mac and second from the Monterey Mac on the same printer and paper. We measured the patches with an i1Pro2 and compared the readings in Patch Tool by Babelcolour. Normally, the results would be almost perfectly matched - certainly well below de: 1.0. BUT, the readings from these prints differed significantly. While over half of them did read under de: 1.0, others including some midtones of the greyscale approached 1.0 and several were over to 1.3.
Something has changed. Something is wrong. A quick, cursory glance at the Monterey print versus Mojave print would lead one to believe they may be the same. But, fortunately the particular depth of red in that one image of the woman with tanned skin tone has revealed the inaccuracy between the Monterey and Movjave prints quite clearly. The inaccurate greens and general coolness were discovered later, after closer inspection. I posted our finding on this in another forum. One or two replies were from folks who had printed from PhotoShop or LightRoom in Monterey and claimed that their results were identical. As I said earlier, we have used this particular test image set for many years and know it very well. But, if we had deleted that pic of the woman with deeply tanned skin tone from that image set, we may well have missed this inaccuracy. "Close" is NOT close enough for us. And I'm certain that most discerning participants of this forum would clearly see the difference in these test prints and find it unacceptable. I am very curious if anyone else has seen such difference between prints from these operating systems or if anyone knows of a work-around. I certainly can't imagine one.
Mick
