Very weird printing results...
- I have returned to printing from LightRoom (had been printing out of Photoshop or thru RIP) now that I've upgraded to v.5:
1. Turn on Soft Proofing, make SP copy, then tweak for output thru a custom profile I made with i1Profiler (profile is quite satisfactory printing thru Photoshop to Epson SP7880).
2. Print using LR doing conversion to output profile, all color management disabled in Epson driver.
- results are
way off, prints are much darker (particularly the blues), more contrast, etc. Not darker & greener that might suggest no conversion to output profile, but clearly way off.
Double- & triple-checked all settings, in LR and printer driver - can't find an error. (guess I should mention here that I'm not a rookie, have been using PS & LR each since beta status, color management & printing veteran as well, and am pretty confident I have ruled out operator error in the apps & printer driver - nobody's perfect of course
, but I've checked, re-checked settings & replicated this behavior a couple times)
Eventually I tried exporting the Soft Proof Copies themselves as Tiffs, opened them in Photoshop to see what they look like & soft proof appearance (Proof Setup) - they match up pretty well with LR5's prediction in Soft Proofing. Just for grins, in the Photoshop Proof Setup > Custom window, I checked "Preserve RGB Numbers" -
bam - a very close match to the actual print output! Which suggests to me that LR5 sent the files to the printer driver
without converting to the printer profile.
So I next reprinted the same Soft Proof Copies from LR5, but this time told LR to have "Printer Manage Colors" & set the Epson driver to use the same custom profile I had previously specc'd in LR. The output matches LR's soft proofing very closely!
What might be going on here? Have I stumbled into a circumstance where LR5 is not using the output profile (not converting) despite being set to do so? Sure seems like it.
Or have I overlooked some obvious (to everyone but me, perhaps) error?
Thanks for your thoughts.
John