Epson 3880 ABW printing profile unavailable

Shortly after I purchased the Epson 3880 about 2 1/2 years ago, I had a pair of custom profiles created for me for a knock off Luster paper--one for color, one Advanced Black and White.  I've been printing b&w images with the ABW profile through CS5 ever since.

I recently upgraded to CS6 and tried to access the ABW profile through the printing dialog and it doesn't show up in the list--nor do countless other icc and icm profiles that are available in the print dialog in CS5.  The ABW profile in question is available in CS6 via soft proofing and profile conversion, but not printing.  I believe it was created with QTR and is a grayscale profile, not RGB.  Via a Google search, I found some discussion about this matter and I gather that the profile's lack of availability in the CS6 print dialog is by design--that non-RGB profiles are regarded as "inappropriate" (for lack of a better word and without devolving into the rather arcane specifics behind this matter, which appear to have more to do with the MS and Mac operating system specs than any conscious choice by Adobe's engineers) for RGB printers.  This doesn't help me any, however.

Is anyone aware of a workaround that will allow me to access this printing profile via CS6?  I can still print using the profile with CS5 and will do so if necessary, but this is a pain in the behind, to put it mildly.

I hadn't seen this report yet, and it is very unfortunate to hear. Doing some quick research, this looks like a design choice by Adobe to strip a whole range of profiles from being available in the printing dialog starting with CS6. This is a very poor choice on their part, yet another bungled move in the printing pipeline. It has nothing to do with Windows or Mac OS, this time; purely a flawed assumption by Adobe that an RGB printing device should only be permitted to print via an RGB profile. A QTR profile indeed is a grayscale profile and so they've removed the option to print using such profiles on RGB printers.

Hopefully Adobe will reverse the choice. In the meantime, if you are on Windows I'd recommend you give Qimage a try as your printing solution. It is a quirky piece of software but there's much discussion of it here in past threads, including quite a number of reasons why I believe it's a better printing tool than Photoshop regardless of this new Adobe issue. If you're on Mac OS but use a Windows virtual environment you can run Qimage that way; I know of quite a few Mac folks who do just that in order to have access to this tool for printing...

Thanks, Royce. I contacted the person who built the profile for me and he mocked up a monochrome/RGB version of it. Neither of us thinks that it will do the trick, but I'm going to run some tests.

If it doesn't...I do still have CS5 installed and can use that with the original profile as designed. And perhaps I will look into Qimage again. (I gave it a look a few years ago and using it was...let's just say it seemed more than a tiny bit convoluted.)

Good luck with an RGB profile for use with ABW. I guess there's some chance it may work but it's probably not going to be ideal.
http://forums.adobe.com/message/4737926

Honestly Qimage will give you better printed results and you won't have to deal with the constant issue of Adobe or whomever else screwing the heck out of the printing workflow. Qimage has a learning curve but it's totally worth it to learn, I believe. If you're going to have to keep dropping back to CS5 to print anyway assuming CS6 doesn't get fixed (the same problem now exists in Lightroom, it seems), then IMO you might as well go out to an app like Qimage that is far better for printing purposes anyway...