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by E.J. Peiker on Mon Jul 18, 2016 10:34 pm
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This interesting article just posted on Luminous Landscapes - if you a re seeing sudden weird color shifts from your printer, it is likely due to the latest versions of Photoshop and Lightroom:
https://luminous-landscape.com/whither-adobe/
 

by Royce Howland on Tue Jul 19, 2016 8:14 am
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Note that the issue appears to be only affecting printing from Mac OS X; I've neither experienced nor seen reports of any printing issues from any version of Windows. From reading about the issue over the past couple of weeks, this latest situation seems likely to be an Adobe-triggered issue with the latest app updates. But underneath, I don't doubt it's related once again to a flawed interaction between the apps and the Mac OS X ColorSync colour management system.

For all the supposed benefits of ColorSync in digital colour management, it has been nothing short of a gong show of unpredictable colour management problems over the past several years. All of the major print colour management issues -- even the few that have occurred on Windows with apps that run on both platforms -- have been triggered by Mac OS X issues.

The print shop where I'm at has been based on Macs (chosen well before I got there :) ). I have seen this print colour whack issue printing from Photoshop just over the past week. Fortunately our main printing software is ImagePrint, which insulates us to a large extent since it completely bypasses the normal print driver pipeline. But we can't use ImagePrint for everything. So one of my directions now is to entirely eliminate Mac OS X from our production workflow. It simply isn't a credible print or colour management platform in my opinion, and I have no intention of continuing to fight these sorts of issues. It's a waste of time, paper, ink and jeopardizes our quality commitment to customers.

Adobe, Epson and Apple all bear mutual responsibility for this farcical level of instability in printing and colour management. But the fact remains it occurs almost exclusively on Mac OS X, and continues to occur despite a hue & cry every time something goes off the rails. So for us at the shop (as it has been for me personally the entire time), it's back to Windows for all the production work...
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by E.J. Peiker on Tue Jul 19, 2016 8:43 am
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In my opinion, Royce, ColorSync is, has been, and maybe always will be a deeply flawed implementation of color management on the Mac platform. yes it's convenient and easy but Apple has demonstrated over and over again that they do not have a handle on serious color management. If I were doing serious print production from a Mac I would most definitely use a RIP. Then there is Adobe that has also broken the color management pipeline several times in its history. No wonder there is so much confusion on this topic. Other then the complexity of their driver, I put less blame on Epson than I do on Apple and Adobe. Both company's handling of issues like this has also been deplorable.
 

by Royce Howland on Tue Jul 19, 2016 7:46 pm
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Agreed. Apple innovated in the early days with ColorSync. E.g. we have monitor calibration mechanisms that owe some important underlying capability to Apple. But that was a long time ago. Now, when Apple changes something in Mac OS X and/or ColorSync that has anything to do with display output, print output, or colour management, as often as not it creates negative effects. Some of these are quite large.

Adobe likewise is to blame for many issues of their own, plus ongoing feuding or disengagement with Apple that leave customers in the lurch. I'm voting Apple off the island for our print shop's production workflow and would do the same for Adobe, but the latter is just not feasible. Photoshop and a couple of other apps are simply too critical to our workflow and there's no credible alternative for them. But there is a credible alternative to Mac OS X, so we're going with it. That will make a lot of improvement right there.
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by E.J. Peiker on Wed Jul 20, 2016 5:47 am
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I have already voted Apple off the island in any photo work and am down to just finalizing images and potentially applying plug-ins in Adobe, most everything else is done in Capture One, Photomatix, and PTGUI. Adobe, unless it dramatically revises how it does business will never get another cent from me.
 

by Royce Howland on Tue Jul 26, 2016 7:33 pm
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An update for Lightroom is now available that reportedly fixes the wrong-colour printing problem. I don't run LR (or Windows or Mac OS X) so can't comment on it directly.

http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal ... lable.html
Royce Howland
 

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