Digital BW, The Print

I've done some testing of various color management approaches and it is indeed confusing.

Here's what I've deduced using CS3 and CS4 with QTR drivers printing stepwedges.
CS3 with No Color Mgmt I consider the "correct" result.  The driver gets 21 evenly stepped values.  

With CS4, only Photoshop Manages Color with Print Profile = Working Gray Space gives
the identical results.  (assuming grayscale, untagged file).

Printer Manages Color makes a default conversion to Generic Gray Profile which is a gamma 1.8
profile.  If you happen to use GG 1.8 as a working space this conversion may not hurt but if
you use GG 2.2 it'll darken the print.   I think this has been true in PS for several versions.

To make things more complicated OS X 10.5 has a new print dialog pane called Color Matching
which allows you to select Colorsync vs driver based mode and ICC profiles.  I don't know
how this will affect things -- I'd leave it alone.

No Color Management is selectable with an RGB file but I just got blank pages with this option.
-- QTR definitely received a blank page from the system.  This is probably related to your
ABW printing not working.

Note that the CS4 documentation specifically states to use No CM for making custom ICC profiles.

-----

I'd be curious if your colleague has any more detailed info about Apple and/or Adobe color
management.   (Does "CS4 now has the same behavior as LR" mean that CS4 broke NoCM so
that it matches LR which lacks the feature?  :) )

Roy


--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "kingdex3434" <kingdex3434@...> wrote:
>
> 
> > 3) The suggestion Printer Manages Color may also work but I don't know for
> > sure that the OS Colorsync CM wouldn't get in the act too.
> 
> Roy,
> 
> Here is a bit of additional information I've picked up from a very reliable colleague. 
> Thought you might like to comment:
> 
> The deeper explanation going on here has to do with printing interfaces on OS X changing 
> over time. In the past, some printer drivers (notably Canon, with its older iPF series 
> printers) did not interpret the image data appropriately and thus had incorrect driver 
> settings that could not be reset by the user. Photoshop CS3 worked around some of these 
> issues for specific drivers, but did not conform to Apple's OS X specifications for how to 
> pass image data to the print driver, leading to problems elsewhere. With CS4, Adobe has 
> taken the approach of conforming to Apple's latest print driver interface specifications, so 
> CS4 now has the same behavior as LR with regards to printing on OS X.
> 
> However, many print drivers have not been updated to conform to the OS X printing 
> interface, and thus some folks are experiencing printing issues, such as double color-
> management. This is unfortunate, but it really needs to be addressed by the printer 
> drivers.
> 
> Now, back to the ABW situation: I don't know if Epson has a glitch with the ABW driver 
> under the latest OS X release. I have occasionally seen what you've seen: i.e., I hit "Print" in 
> PS CS4 and nothing comes out. But then I mess around a little with the Epson printer 
> driver configuration and then it works.
> 
> In particular, I found that if I had an older "saved setting" or preset within the Epson driver 
> that I used to recall a particular ABW driver setting, then it would fail. So I deleted all my 
> Epson driver presets and started again from scratch (manually selecting media type, color 
> mode, ABW settings, paper config, etc.) Then I haven't had any trouble printing ABW 
> images since.
> 
> Regards,
> kingdex
>