Curious Printer Experiment

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What I did not expect was adding the Adobe profile to make 3 work better than 2 to actually work!  It definitely changes the result.  I am simply curious as to how it works!  Sent to the printer in ARGB mode without using the profile the results are horrible! You certainly understand the workings of Adobe products better than most people, and I am simply a hobbyist who uses them (since PS 7). I am not suggesting that this become the standard practice for anyone.  I am not going to abandon the normal color managed workflow for my serious pursuits, but I am going to use it when I print pictures of people because I like the result.

[digitaldog]

What I did not expect was adding the Adobe profile to make 3 work better than 2 to actually work!  It definitely changes the result.  I am simply curious as to how it works!

PMC is a bit of a black box and differs across OSs, so how it works fully isn't clear. It doesn't suck. It never sucked. It's for those who don't want or can't use a full color management path. As mentioned, it offers far fewer options, so for some, that's great. But not ideal.

As for any "Print without color management", in older versions of Photoshop, you could soft-proof the effect in Convert to Profile using "Preserve Color Numbers", which is gone. Because it was kind of useless to 99.8% of users: Show me what this image would look like if I didn't use a profile and sent the current numbers to the printer as is. You can get close by opening your document and assigning the printer profile. Now you see just how butt ugly it would appear without color management, something you can't do with Adobe apps and, for that matter, most others. It is getting progressively more difficult to do this; even Adobe's Color Print Utility is broken on Mac under Tahoe.

[Kyle Jackson]

To clarify, the three test prints were made as follows:
I selected Andrew Rodney's adobe RGB test print in Lightroom and opened it in the print module.

1.  Set Lightroom to manage color and used the printer icc profile for the paper I generated, and set the printer to color management off in the driver drop down.
2.  Set lightroom to Printer manages color, no profile and the printer to Adobe RGB mode (same drop down in the driver).
3.  Set lightroom to manage color and used the Adobe Lightroom 1998 icc profile as the printer profile and set the printer to Adobe RGB mode.

Ok thanks for that. So for greater clarity you had:

1. App managed (printer profile) + driver CM OFF
2. Printer managed + driver CM ON (aRGB source)
3. App managed (aRGB profile) + driver CM ON (aRGB source)

#3 still looks like conflicting settings to me, because CM is enabled for both the app and driver.

So silly Q: what is your image's colour space? Asking because I would have expected option 2 to be the normal "printer manages colour" (PMC) approach, assuming your image was indeed in aRGB. But you're saying option 2 bombed out (and option 3 somehow looked "ok"), so I get the feeling your image's colour space is maybe something other than aRGB (proPhoto, etc?).

I feel it's important because if we really want to use the PMC path then we should use the intended settings, and not something else that somehow lucks into an ok result by chance -- unpredictable, like Andrew said.

In PS (at least with my ancient CS5 version and printers), I think I simply set PMC in PS, then PMC in the driver with source space set to match my image (sRGB or aRGB), and I think I need to convert the image to that space if it's not already. So in other words it's the same settings as your option 2 in LR. (And option 3 would not even be an option for me in PS, to beat that drum to death lol.)

So again I'm wondering if your image was even in aRGB? If not, then I can only speculate what your option 3 did, but it sounds like you get "double CM" (I really don't know what to call it) where the app first converted your image to aRGB (and thus why it came out ok), and then the rest of the PMC flow works as expected. So like Andrew said, you "end up with" PMC. But I find it weird if that's how PMC is actually intended to be configured with your version of LR.

But again I'm not very familiar with LR printing. I'm just trying to learn from this as much as you are, because it's really corrupting my CM principles lol. 

[Simon J.A. Simpson]

 

even Adobe's Color Print Utility is broken on Mac under Tahoe.

Oh dear…

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So silly Q: what is your image's colour space? Asking because I would have expected option 2 to be the normal "printer manages colour" (PMC) approach, assuming your image was indeed in aRGB. But you're saying option 2 bombed out (and option 3 somehow looked "ok"), so I get the feeling your image's colour space is maybe something other than aRGB (proPhoto, etc?).

I feel it's important because if we really want to use the PMC path then we should use the intended settings, and not something else that somehow lucks into an ok result by chance -- unpredictable, like Andrew said.

The image I first printed was Andrew's color test file, a TIF in Adobe RGB.  I always save a flattened image in Adobe RGB for printing, so all the files I have tested are in Adobe RGB.

That is why I tried using that display space as the output profile in Lightroom.  I do not know why the print is terrible with the printer set to Adobe RGB and  light room to printer manages, but it is bad.  The profile fixes it well.  I never print from Photoshop and do not really care to.

[eronald]

Oh dear…

Does Colorsync utility work?

[Simon J.A. Simpson]

According to Calibrate, yes.  And that is now their recommended workflow for printing targets.