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Re: [datacolor_group] Spyder Print - Mac OS X Mountain Lion and target printing

2012-11-30 by James R. Holtzman

I'm probably not the best to answer this, but since nobody else has 
stepped up, I'll give you my two cents worth.

I don't use a mac, but I don't think that matters here.

Spyder print s/w does not turn off the color management in your printer.

I'd be willing to bet that if you dig deep enough on your hp 7515 
settings you will find the place to
turn off the color management.  I don't have one setup on my 
computer, otherwilse I'd try to find it
for you.

Me, I am new to color management.  It all started I went to print 
some large posters on one of my
wide carriage printers and noticed the colors were off.  It wasn't 
important to me since I wasn't printing
photos, but eventually I wanted it fixed.  The first thing I learned 
about was calibrating the monitor.  I did
that, didn't help.  Then I took this datacolor on-line seminar, 
probably from B&H photo.  It went on from
there.

Color management has to be turned off in the printer properties, 
somewhere, you may have to look hard
to find where.  Different brands of printers will use different 
terminology.  I understand you don't have to
use Spyder Print to print the targets, but I think it is best to do 
so.  I've heard they do give you the .tiff
files that you could print with another program though.

The idea is, you want the printer to print the targets with no 
correction at all, so the patches in the targets
print just the raw colors.  I can't think of a better way to say 
it.  Let's say the color to be printed is what
you and I call red.  Say the uncorrected printer prints 
orange.   After your test prints have dried properly,
you scan them in with the Spyder, it can read the colors and knows 
what to expect.  It sees that the
expected color is not red as you and I would agree to, but it sees a 
different color.  I think it builds up a
lookup table, called a profile.  It does this for a bunch of 
colors.  Once you have created a color profile
that you have named, that profile, if created properly, and that's 
important, will be used when you print
future photos, etc, using a program like photoshop that knows what a 
color profile is.

So when printing with photoshop, you leave the color correction off 
in the printer properties, in other
words, color is not managed in the printer but in the computer.  In 
photoshop, you will tell it the name
of the profile to use.  When you go to print with photoshop, it will 
know how to correct the data going
to the printer so it prints red instead of orange.

The problem I had where I complained that I had green blotches, there 
was an error in my .icc files,
my profile.  I didn't realize that until I got some help from this 
forum.  Once I found which patches were
read wrong, and re-scanned them, I saved to a new profile, printed 
from there, and bingo, what I think
is a perfect photo.

If you print with some other program, somehow you have to utilize the 
new profiles you made, one
for each kind of paper, ink, printer, etc.

In windoze, for example, if I were to print with their picture and 
fax viewer, I don't know if there is a way
to tell the printer to use my custom profiles or not, might be but I 
haven't found where yet.  So by
printing in that manor, I get prints that are not color corrected.

I hope I didn't tell you something you already know, hope this 
helps.  This forum has helped me.

Jim H.

At 10:45 PM 11/28/2012, you wrote:
>I'd like to know the correct way to print the targets.
>
>I understand that color management needs to be disabled when 
>printing targets but does the Spyder Print software do that?
>
>Do I print them from within the Spyder Print software or from Photoshop?
>
>My printer, a lowly HP 7510, seems to have no way to turn off color 
>management.
>
>I want to be sure that I'm printing the targets correctly and would 
>appreciate it if someone could clear this up :).
>
>I'm not new to color management having used Xrite in the past but 
>this is the first time with Datacolor.
>
>
>
>
>
>------------------------------------
>
>Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
James R. Holtzman
Empirical Technology
Carmichael, CA  95608
(916) 487-9712
emptech@...
http://www.emp-tech.net

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