On Feb 10, 2006, at 8:51 AM, Lon Williamson wrote:
I still scan film, and the most color correction I have is
Adobe Gamma. My printers do not have any icc profiles for
specific paper/ink combinations, and my film scanner can scan
into a specified workspace but is not profiled.
Windows 98 has, in the Printer control panel, the ability to
attach a profile to a printer. If that is done, is it necessary
in photoshop, when printing, to specify the same profile that you
attach to a printer if you DON'T specify "printer color management"?
What the heck happens if you do or don't?
Color management with profiles for printer is pretty much a waste of
time if you don't profile your monitor so that it is calibrated
properly. Adobe Gamma can do a decent enough job for a lot of
purposes, but it's not as good as a hardware colorimeter and
calibration software. The latter leads to much more consistent results.
Here's a basic color management plan:
1) calibrate your monitor
2) set up Photoshop's color management policies and rules to your
preference.
3) color manage output to the printer
The profile provides a translation of the color specifications in
your image file, through LAB colorspace, to provide an accurate
translation from screen rendering to printer rendering. It should
only be applied once for print output, not twice.
- You can tell Photoshop to apply a profile to your image and then
tell the printer driver to turn all color management off, then
Photoshop does the work.
- OR you can tell Photoshop NOT to color manage the output to a
printer and tell the print driver what kind of profile to use on the
data.
I don't run Windows, nor have I ever dealt with Win98 and color
management. But a profile attached to a printer has to assume some
baseline of paper/ink for the OS in general to apply through the
system wide printing interface. Photoshop's need for color management
policy generally goes well beyond what anything the OS is attempting
to do. I don't know what version of Photoshop you're running ...
color management control was expanded enormously around the time of
Photoshop 6 and has gotten significantly more sophisticated in v7, CS
and CS2 ... but I suspect it would be best to tell Photoshop to do
the color management using the profile you have, tell the printer to
do nothing at all other than print...
Godfrey
