Datacolor User to User Support Group.

On Oct 26, 2010, at 9:10 AM, Myron Gochnauer wrote:

> 
>> You're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
>> 
>> ... in the Color Matching pane of the dialog: yes, the two radio buttons are dimmed
>> and ColorSync comes up auto-selected, but you don't have to worry about what this means. *The
>> "right" thing is happening under the hood, and ColorSync is not applying an extra printer
>> profile to the process.
> 
> I was fine with profiling (setting color control properly in two separate dialogues), but the inconsistency of these dialogues in other contexts was confusing me.  There seem to be three possibilities for the Color Matching pane:  three radio buttons (including one for no color control), two dimmed radio buttons with ColorSync selected, two undimmed radio buttons with Epson selected.  The third one occurs with Photoshop CS and Light Zone 3.9. The first occurs with Spyder3Print, and the second occurs with CS5, Aperture and Lightroom.  It was the second one that confused me. I wanted to explicitly choose not to manage color, or choose to manage color with the Epson driver (and then tell the Epson driver not to manage color at all).  I assumed that even a dimmed ColorSync choice would automatically apply some kind of profiling to the data.  Apparently not.  The dimmed but selected ColorSync button is either a "lie" --- ColorSync is in fact *not* enabled --- or ColorSync only profiles data that does not come already labelled as actively profiled.  ??
> 

Spyder3Print's possibilities end up working the way these controls were intended, because it
does nothing to override or influence any of those controls. Choose "Epson Color Controls"
means that the Epson-specific section of the driver alone is used for handling color,
and so it then makes sense that choosing "Off - No Color Management" in that section does
exactly what it says. If you choose "ColorSync" when you're using Spyder3Print, then you end
up with a profile (whatever you select in the popup that shows up underneath it) and the
Epson specific section has no influence on output colors at all (and the controls in that
section end up being removed and replaced with some explanatory text instead)

Photoshop is a different story. In that case, a dimmed ColorSync choice is a half-lie.
Yes, ColorSync is being used, but no, ColorSync is not being used to apply a printer profile.
Instead, what it's doing "under the hood" is essentially the same as the workaround I listed
for the Canon and HP printers. They're applying the same source and destination profile
(Generic RGB in Leopard and sRGB in Snow Leopard) so that while ColorSync is "turned on",
(and there's no way it can be "turned off", since it's dimmed), it's doing nothing to the
colors that are being sent to the driver: what goes in is the color content of the image
window without any profile having been applied to it. Functionally, it's doing the right
thing, but when you look at the controls in the OSX Print dialog: yes, it can be confusing.

David Miller
Senior Software Developer, Digital Color Solutions
Datacolor