Profilling papers

[Chris Bishop]

I'm trying to get Permajet to profile some of their papers.
How do you turn colour management off in LR?
I tried let printer manage colours, then turned it off in the printer screen, but Permajet say it hasn't worked.
Chris Bishop

[tmgray]

Chris,

What operating system are you running and what make/model printer?  Reason I ask, there is a known issue with MacOSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and Epson printers.

I'm including the following link to The Luminous Landscape forum which discusses this in greater detail:
http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=40209

Tim

[Louie Sherwin]

Chris,

You don't need to use Lightroom to print the profile targets. You are not profiling Lightroom but the printer/paper combination. You can use Photoshop or any other Image display application to open the target files and print them. For example on a Mac you could use Preview. However, there are two conditions that you must be sure are met in order to correctly print the profile target regardless of the the program you use.

First, you must make sure the you do not accidently assign a profile when opening the image. Depending on your preferences in Photoshop you may need to explicitly choose no color profile. I am not sure if you can do the same thing in Lightroom. With Preview on the Mac you can look at the file info (Comand-I) and you can see if a profile is assigned. If a profile is assigned then all bets are off.

Second, you must tell the print driver to not do any color management. This is set in the print dialog box on either Mac and Windows.

If either of these is not happening then the profile will be wrong and you will slowly go mad as all your beautiful images turn to mud on your expensive paper. When you get it right it is a joy to have your prints come out almost exactly as you see them on your monitor. I say almost since there will always be a difference between an active (monitor) and reflective (print on paper) image.

I personally found that profiling my printer/paper sets was one of the most challenging aspects of setting up my workflow. Even when you get everything right there are so many arbitraries that weird things can happen. For example my trusty Epson 2200 has a bad habit of not reporting when I run out of yellow. So all of a sudden my prints will start coming out with a magenta cast. Usually it takes me an hour or two pulling hair and double checking my settings before I remember to run a nozzle check and replace the empty cart. ;-)

The good news is that I LOVE the Lightroom print module. I have been working with LR3 Beta and reprinted some of my older images and boy do they look good. This is especially true with the shadow detail and overall sharpness.

-louie

[Chris Bishop]

Thanks. I was trying to keep the loop closed. Why introduce another variable, LR not truly stand alone yet.
LR Beta 3 v2 now out.
Chris bishop

[Louie Sherwin]

Hi Chris,

From your initial description it seemed to me that Lightroom was the likely culprit messing up the printing of the profile targets. So my thinking is that the simple approach (if anything about color management can be considered simple) is to remove LR from the mix. If selecting "Managed by Printer" in the print job is not working that indicates to me that LR is doing a color conversion somewhere else.  The beta 2 does not provide me any more clues.

It might be instructive to print the profile target files with both Lightroom and Photoshop as I suggested and see if there you can see a difference. If there is then that would be a strong indication that LR is doing color conversion on your target somewhere else in the pipeline.

If your goal is to get printer profiles then I still suggest that your best approach is to try printing with another application where you can be sure that it no color conversions are happening. However, if your goal is to test/debug LR then all the power to you. I do think it seems reasonable that one should be able to override any color management to correctly print profile targets from within LR.

-louie

[Chris Bishop]

I found the answer in Martin Evenings book.
In the absence of an embedded profile (what we need) LR automatically asigns sRGB to the test image, then converts this to native LR RGB as it is passed through the print pipeline.
Chris Bishop
I used CS3