Printing profile glitch with Photoshop and OSX to be aware of

This may be old news here but I'm posting it anyway hoping this information can save you some trouble:

Having changed the bulb in my Nuarc I re-calibrated my Pd printing profile in QTR.

What should have been quick and easy turned into a multi-day exercise in frustration, I couldn't linearize. This was unprecedented.

Here is my email to the QTR forum on the issue followed by Roy Harrington's explanation of the problem:

Printing with linearized QTR profiles in CS3 works fine for me. When I print the
same file in CS5 the dark values are off. I am consistent in my color management
(all gray gamma 2.2) and print set up.
See this example using the supplied QTR Ilford Smooth Pearl profile printing a
21 step wedge and reading LAB L with an Eye-One spectrophotometer. The red line
is the print from Photoshop CS3, the blue line from CS5:
Imageshack - cs3vscs5.jpg
Here is the Photoshop print dialog from CS5:
ImageShack® - Online Photo and Video Hosting

I'd heard rumblings in the past about possible issues with printing in CS5 but
my poor searching skills didn't turn anything up on this in this forum.

I can continue to print in CS3 but was wondering if there was a fix to enable
using CS5?

Roy Harrington's response:

CS4 or CS5 along with OSX 10.5 or 10.6 have a problem doing grayscale.
What happens is that no matter what selections you make in PS the OS always
converts whatever you send it to a fixed profile. In 10.5 its
Generic Gray which
is a gamma 1.8 profile. In 10.6 its a new profile called Generic Gray Gamma 2.2
which you'd think was a gamma 2.2 curve but its not. The little glitch you see
in the graphs is exactly the conversion of Gray Gamma 2.2 to Generic GG 2.2.

Using CS3 is the easiest workaround currently.

Roy

Harlan-- I print both positive prints and digital negs using QTR and Photoshop CS4. In the good old days (before CS4) the advice when printing from QTR was to turn off color management in the Print Window. As you are aware, CS4 and later will not let you do that for grayscale images. My workaround is this:

I imbed the same profile in all my grayscale image files (gray gamma 1.8). Then, in the Print Window the Document Profile shows as gray gamma 1.8. Under Color Handling I choose Photoshop Manages Colors and I set the Printer Profile to gray gamma 1.8. (I have also left Rendering Intent as Perceptual and have left Black Point Compensation turned off--- not too sure about these choices). My impression is that there is nothing sacred about the choice of gamma 1.8. I think this workaround would work as well if gamma 2.2 were in all the image files and the printer profile were set to gamma 2.2 as well.

I think this approach effectively turns off color management. At least it has allowed me to print positive prints with the pre-made profiles that install with QTR. And it works fine with the custom profiles I make to print digital negatives for palladium printing.

Cheers, Ron Reeder

This utility may be of use?

Adobe Color Printer Utility

More on OSX + Photoshop printing glitch

Hello Ron,
The method you describe for setting up your sounds like what I do?
Have a look at
ImageShack® - Online Photo and Video Hosting
and let me know what you think.
Based on Roy's message it sounds like OSX 10.5 defaults to GG 1.8 when printing. Could it be that you are using 10.5 and thus your image profiles match the default gray space of the 10.5 print output?
If you are using OSX 10.6 it sounds like you have a fix and it would be interesting to pin down the variable that controls it. Maybe it is your black point/rendering intent settings which are different from mine.
-Harlan

Hello Tim,
This looks interesting, I'll give it a go and let you know what happens.
-Harlan

Harlan-- I am running CS4 and OSX 10.6.6. I am no color management expert, but I did show this work around to Roy once last year and he thought it was OK. It would be interesting to know if it works for other folks and other configurations as well. Cheers, Ron Reeder

I will give Ron's work around method a try later today with CS5 and OS 10.6.6. So far I have not found a way to match output in QTR with CS3 where it is possible to choose No Color Management and CS5, where this is not possible. I have tried a couple of suggested work around solutions but in neither case did output exactly match printing with CS5 what I get with CS3. I must say it is extremely irritating to upgrade to CS5 and then find that printing is a downgrade from the old version.

Sandy

Ron-san said:

Harlan-- I am running CS4 and OSX 10.6.6. I am no color management expert, but I did show this work around to Roy once last year and he thought it was OK. It would be interesting to know if it works for other folks and other configurations as well. Cheers, Ron Reeder

Click to expand...

sanking said:

I will give Ron's work around method a try later today with CS5 and OS 10.6.6. So far I have not found a way to match output in QTR with CS3 where it is possible to choose No Color Management and CS5, where this is not possible. I have tried a couple of suggested work around solutions but in neither case did output exactly match printing with CS5 what I get with CS3. I must say it is extremely irritating to upgrade to CS5 and then find that printing is a downgrade from the old version.

Sandy

Click to expand...

This week I discovered another really wierd issue using OS 10.6.6 and CS5 though not related at all to printing.

While working with a scan of the PDN 101 step step tablet I was unable to set the Black & White point properly so that patch #1 had the value of 0 and patch 101 had the value of 255. I can do this in CS3 on a PC with not problems what so ever.

I found this to be quite a surprise. I spent the week working with PS CS5 on a Mac and hated the experience. This was my first pass using CS5 and I was under-whelmed. We also found some odd problems with the Printer interface as well such as not being able to drag the image around in the media boundry after unchecking the center image setting.

Don Bryant said:

I found this to be quite a surprise. I spent the week working with PS CS5 on a Mac and hated the experience. This was my first pass using CS5 and I was under-whelmed. We also found some odd problems with the Printer interface as well such as not being able to drag the image around in the media boundry after unchecking the center image setting.

Click to expand...

I do find reasons to use CS5, including the Content Aware Filter and the fact that I can run it in 64 bit on my iMAC with OS 10.6.6, which makes it a lot faster than CS3.

However, for printing I really dislike CS5 and will continue to use CS3. I just tried the work around that Ron described and the density values at 100% and 50% were quite different (more than log 0.10) when printing with CS3 and CS5. So if one has a QTR profile or PDN curve that was prepared with CS3 I believe it would be wise to re-do it if moving from printing with CS3 to CS5.

Sandy King

Sandy-- Maybe the reason why my work-around functions for me is that I mostly use it for printing digital negatives and I find reason to redo my QTR profiles every few months. So, probably my latest profile takes care of any problems in the color management workflow. However, I have used the method to print positive inkjet prints with QTR and they looked good to me. I also took the trouble to print out a step tablet using some of the canned profiles that come with QTR. When I scanned and measured the various grayscale steps they were quite accurate and linear.
Is CS5 even worse than CS4? I agree that it is a major pain for such an expensive piece of software to go backwards on such a crucial issue.

Cheers, Ron Reeder

CS3 vs CS5 printing

Hello Sandy,
Roy Harrington noted that whatever gray space you use in CS5 and OS 10.6 that, on printing, it gets converted into the "generic GG 2.2" space.
So unless your default gray space in CS5 is this one you will have trouble on printing.
The consequence for me was that my digital negatives would plateau in the final two steps causing blocked highlights in my prints. Working in GG 2.2 I tested a dozen modified QTR profiles and many gray curves, getting more and more extreme, to try to get rid of this plateau without success. Wasted nearly a week of darkroom time and a lot of palladium. I thought it was due to some quirk in the spectrum of my new light bulb in my Nuarc....
I see the take-home message as to either print in CS3 or work in CS5 in the "generic gg 2.2" space that your print ends up in anyway (haven't tried that yet but plan to). From my experience it could be really tough to re-calibrate for printing in CS5 without the gray space coordination working for you.
-Harlan