I have a dyesub printer with 3 colour dyefilm and I want to produce an ICC profile for it to under Windows XP.
I am stuck on a simple point, one of those hind site things hopefully.
If I produce a profile and install it in XP will it work without the printer driver being aware of it. Does windows cooperate with the Driver or just use the profile before passing the colour data over to the driver?
I can understand stopping all colour management within the driver for this to be possible. In digging through the msdn information which confuses me greatly it seemed to imply that windows asked the driver what profile to use?
Can anyone shed any light on this confusion of mine?
I might not be understanding what your overall objective is, but I will answer your individual questions the best I can.
The profiles you install in Windows XP don’t do anything until a program or driver calls for them to be used. In most printing workflows you have the option of using a profile in the program itself (the Photoshop print dialog window for example), or in the driver for the printer (ie: the Sony driver dialog that shows up after you click “Print” in Photoshop). By default this driver color management is left on so that most people can get decent colored prints out of basic programs like Word or Paint. So one of the first things you learn when you want to take control of your color management is to turn off that color management (use of profiles) in the driver so that the color conversion is only taking place one time, in one place - ususally in the program.
But it is one or the other. And both driver and program access the profiles from the same location in that color folder in Windows.
I am not familiar with all the details of how the OS talks with the driver. Practically speaking we just make sure CM is off in both places when printing a profiling target, and there are several ways to confirm that. Once you have a properly printed target, you can read it and build a profile & apply it in one place in your workflow.
BTW, it’s very rare that a true CMY profile would be needed. If you are printing through a driver, even to a dye sub printer, it’s most likely that you would want to build a typical RGB profile.
Try to add to your printer a CMYK profile for example EuroscaleCoated.icc if don’t get an error message and profile is successfully added to your printer this means that you have CMYK device and could try to make a CMYK profile for it.
If you get an error that your printer doesn’t support CMYK color profile, then you must create RGB profile. It’s that simple.
What printer do you have?
Canon SELPHY printers seem to not have an option in the printer driver to turn off color management, anyone noticed this?
It’s definately a cmyk printer only I use cmy and no K.
Our driver has an option to embed a cmky icc profile and it was in trying to achieve that that I got into a mess. I have figured out all the details now and have a process to follow. Also I have simply produced an RGB profile and my aim was to compare the two and decide which route to take in future.
Unfortunately I noticed an oddity, If I convert the RGB file to cmyk in pgotoshop and then print it with no colour management via an external utility the results are better than if I send the RGB direct with no colour management either. On the one hand Photoshop converts from RGB to CMYK and on the other the non colour managed driver. Clearly two different transformations are being used … or is that ‘clearly’ just an indication that I have yet still more to learn?
I had expected the results to be equally bad or equally good without any colour management at all.
So you tried to add the CMYK. profile to your printer driver and it did not give you an error right?
If you have a CMYK device it’s no wonder that you will have better color using CMYK - LAB - CMYK than if you use RGB - LAB - RGB/CMYK
I mean every printer prints with cmyk ink right. So the chipset of any printer converts data to CMYK for printing. The “can of woms” is hidden in the driver because if it can accept only RGB data and you send it CMYK then you get double conversion that leads to wrong colors, or just an error message.
