I've got Photoshop 7, and am stuck there... CS requires WinXP,
which the ex-wife took with her. The salient question is this:
If you attach sRGB to a cheaper inkjet in the printer control panel,
is it necessary to specify "printer color management" or "sRGB" in
the print dialog box of photoshop? I am NOT gonna spend money any
time soon on a colorimeter or densitometer calibration system. The
divorce cost me many 10's of thousands. Anyone wanna address this one
specific thing? I've looked around the net for a few hours and found
no tidbit of info, and I hate testing this kind of thing. Waste of ink,
paper, and slow print times for me.
Thanks. -Lon
Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote:
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
