Forums

Neil,

My printers are Epson 9800 and 7800. I'm working from Mac Intel, OSX 10.5.5. Prior to CS4, when printing grayscale images (ABW, QTR, made no difference) I could alway chose "No color Management" in the print dialog box. In CS4 that option is not available unless I convert to RGB first. So, what's the newly recommended way to proceed with grayscale images? Particularly those without proriles?

King

As it turns out my original problem has led into a more serious set of color management changes found in CS4. In my case, for instance, I'm finding it difficult to determine the correct way to print untagged, ABW grayscale profiling targets. Others are having similar difficulties with color profiling. Other forums are buzzing as people migrate to PSCS4: Here are just a few examples that hopefully will attract Adobe attention here:

Excerpt #1:
Sounds like this should be raised in the PS forums where Chris Cox
will pick it up. (I raised the colour mgt issues of Bridge there and
they picked that up.)
Excerpt #2:
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.
Excerpt #3
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 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.

A brief update post may be in order here:

The problem of ABW profiling and ABW workflow in CS4 is still unresolved. Specifically, PSCS4, LR2 and Mac Leopard are all presently having trouble living together. This manifests in particular when it comes to using ABW profiles for b&w output in LR2 or PSCS4. In CS4, profiled printing using "Photoshop Manages Color" and the ABW driver do not produce expected results. Until this situation is resolved it is recommended that PSCS3; CS3 ABW profiles and "Photoshop Manages Color" be used for accurate printing to the ABW driver.

The situation is maddening since it restricts controlled ABW printing as well as profiling in LR2 and PSCS4. The situation is being aggressively pursued with "The Big Three" Adobe, Apple & Epson.

Regards,
kingdex

Chris,

There is a very BIG problem with regard to ABW printing in PSCS4 and LR2. I'll try and get you the specifics, but rest assured printing grayscale files in CS4 using Photoshop Manages Color, a custom (ABW) profile and the ABW driver yield unpredictable and unacceptable results. This was not the case in PSCS3. The process worked perfectly in CS3. It seems that we also should be able to use the same profiles and ABW workflow in CS4 but that is not the case. This leads to the conclusion that something has changed in CS4. And, as far as ABW workflow is concerned, this change is so far, not for the better. Exhaustive testing has been on-going by myself and several others since the problem was discovered. All of which corroborates what I'm referring to. I'll do my best to get you up to speed off line since the testing and experimentation data is much too voluminous to post. I'm sure we all look forward to your future comments.

Regards,
kingdex