Fun with icc profiles and CS5 and Mac OS X

[thisismike]

Hello there. My name is mike from AZ and I make zines. Or rather, i did make zines until i couldn't print properly anymore.

Scraping the dark corners of the web, I'm finding that my problem is not unusual and the fine folks here seem to know the most. Can anyone offer a solution to problem I'm having? Maybe my troubleshooting results shed light on the overall issue?

I was printing just fine LAST YEAR in Snow Leopard / CS3 to a Xerox 6010 laser printer with a custom profile.

Got a new system with Lion. CS3 was broken on Lion. Got Photoshop CS5. Now I can't print using my profile. Prints are too dark and too red. All prints look the identical regardless of the profile I choose or if the printer or photoshop manages color.

Here's where things get interesting (and by interesting I mean crazy-making)

I threw in the towel, decided to downgrade back to a Leopard system and got a junky old iMac running a clean install of 10.5.4. Guess what, my prints look good coming out of Preview with my profile selected in the printer driver dialogue box. Almost perfect but just a tad dark and a tad saturated. This is my first glimmer of hope in four months! I start to rejoice that I'll be getting some sleep again.

Preview isn't that great for printing... So I decided to install CS5 on this system and try again.

CS5 requires 10.5.8 so I update the OS using software update (but not photoshop yet) and try printing out of Preview again just to check that its not the OS update to 10.5.8 that's causing the prob. Another good but not perfect print, same as before.

Then I install CS5. My prints are too dark and too red. Back to square 1.

I try printing out of Preview again.
NOW Preview crashes every time I try to select profiles out of the Printer dialogue box.
It appears that CS5 broke ColorSync in some way.
I uninstall Photosohp CS5 using adobe uninstall utility.
Still crash Preview when trying to select a profile in the Printer dialogue box.

Now, I do another clean install and print from preview.

This time, I print out of preview using a brand spanking new custom profile i just made with colormunki and my print is dead on. Win.

So now I can print again, even though the method to get that print is dumb dumb dumb. (Preview app)

In conclusion, Photoshop CS5 appears to break colorsync in Leopard in a way that affects printing from other applications that were not affected before it was installed and even after its uninstalled. The difference between slightly off profile #1 and dead one new profile #2 is unexplained.

I can work with this but would like to print from Photoshop. Any ideas? If not, thanks for humoring me and my minor discoveries.

That is all. Thanks,

Mike

[Nora_nor]

Ah Too dark prints problem again.

I hope they do not throw rocks at us. There have been endless discussions abut too dark prints.
(red cast and dark prints is discussed in the epson user manual, they say it is due to no colour management)

Kinda same thing here, so I tried the Pixl test image from an new pc laptop Win7 and new Lightroom4 trial and it was perfect.

Something with apple is broken again.

There is a LOT about that in the past too...and the easy answer was your display is too bright, but people were printing the same old files which would not be affected by screens. Happened when moving from cs2 or 3 to cs4 or something like that.

At one point apple assigned some small RGB profile to files sent to printer, but that was solved by an update.
Another problem many had, was that no icc profile was applied. Too dark prints there too. If one looks at soft proof or print preview and chooses preserve numbers, and the print looks like that, that seems to be the case.

And so on, lots of postings on the internet about why.
Usually they answered your screen is too bright...

now problem is that all my programs are on macs. (but I have a pc somewhere with CS3 or 5, might hook it up. But it was Lightroom I wanted to use)

Maybe try to print the whacked profile test files? They are somewhere online. That would reveal if no profile is used? Maybe someone has a link?

[thisismike]

Yes, The stock "profile your screen" response is frustrating. obvs I'm beyond that step. jeez. Oh well, the interesting minutia in my particular case is that cs5 actually breaks previously working colorsync in other apps. hmmm

[Nora_nor]

me suspects the recent update from apple.

I guess I will go fetch an old pc with CS5 suite and xp .

meanwhile, I will try the things suggested here lately, like unhiding the library, http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=63038.0 or like uninstall and removing all printers from from printer list and re-installing (and the cups issue)

here about the unhiding http://www.drycreekphoto.com/icc/mac_osx_sys_profile_folder.html found here on this forum


Updated: Solved somehow, prints perfectly now

Tried unhiding, and a test print of the AdobeRGB pixl test image, from Photoshop, and it prints perfect from at least macbook air.

I will try doing that to the other mac. But I happened to dump some standard icc profiles into the library first  too but that should not matter I think. From http://sites.google.com/site/chromasoft/icmprofiles

Also, the black and white dialogue works fine, with the new drivers for mac, (from Epson UK) both in Lightroom and in Photoshop, just that one has to choose Printer manages colours first. In LR it is hidden to the right. In PS one also has to choose it to the right first, then it is possible afterwards to go to the black and white menu.