CS2 gone nuts - need help

When I opened CS2 the other day I discovered that it had somehow reset itself to the original factory defaults for some reason. I reset them all, but it's still acting funny. Perhaps I missed something.

Todays problem lies in Soft Proofing. When I open an image to be printed and try to duplicate it, the duplicate version is considerably darker and seems to have more contrast - hardly a duplicate. Any ideas on what's causing this and how to correct it?

Thank you for any help you can offer.

First, I think its best to reset PS again just to make sure its totally reset. You do this by launching it while the Ctrl Alt Shift keys are all pressed.

Then make sure you have put everything back to the way it was set-up. You likely didn't get a rendering intent or profile or some other setting back to where it was before your auto reset.

I had the same thing happen just two weeks ago.

Thanks E.J., I'll try it again and see what happens.

E.J. - one more question please.

On the Color Settings; I've reset everything but the Conversion Options. I'm not sure what these were set at before. I know the engine was Adobe, but can't remember if the Intent was set to Relative Colormetric or Perceptual. I use Perceptual as the Intent on my R2400 printer. Should I also use Percetual then for the Intent in PS? I also believe I had both Black Point Comp & Dither boxes checked before, but am not sure. Any advice woul be appreciated here.

Thanks again.

Bill, I normally keep conversion set to Relative Colorimetric and check both boxes (black point & dither).

Relative Colorimetric preserves more of the colors in the image when conversion needs to make adjustments. If any colors are out of gamut, only they are adjusted, being clipped to the last color that is in gamut. All others are maintained as they were. Perceptual shifts the entire color range to fit it within gamut, which changes colors that were actually in gamut as well as those that were out. Color gradations will be smoother, but over-all accuracy is reduced. I prefer to emphasize accuracy of in-gamut colors since I work in ProPhoto RGB and soft proof to check for gamut related issues, and usually try to fix them with specific image adjustments. Using RC lets me instruct the color management system to leave colors mostly alone, fixing only the few that I may miss.

I want to ask what you mean by "I use Perceptual as the intent on my R2400 printer". Do you mean you have that setting in the Epson print driver?

Thanks Royce for the insights.

Allow me to start from your last question first. Yes, my Epson Print Screen asks for Rendering Intent, and the Moab profiles suggested using Perceptual in that option.

Do you know if it would cause any conflict to use RC in the CS2 Color Preferences and Perceptual in the Print Screen? If no conflict would occur I will leave my Color Preferences to RC.

Now my browser has been going nuts trying to respond to this. Locked up twice, this is my third time to compose this. Bill, maybe you had a poltergeist or something and now I've got it.

Anyway, sorry to be a bit obtuse but I want to make sure we're talking about the same thing so I don't provide even more confusing suggestions. By print screen, I presume you mean the Photoshop printer dialog that comes from File > Print with Preview. If so, then yes you would choose "Let Photoshop Determine Colors", then pick your appropriate output profile, rendering intent and black point compensation choices here. More on that in a second.

What I meant by "print driver" is the actual printer properties dialog where you set paper size & type, output quality & speed, etc. There are color management controls in there too, but you want to make sure they are all disabled if you have Photoshop doing the color management as above. Otherwise your images will be double-profiled upon output, and will look wrong. Since your initial question was about getting a duplicate print matched properly I wanted to ensure this double profiling was not going on.

Okay, back to mixing different rendering intents. Technically you can do it, there would be no conflict as such. However it might produce some confusing results so I'd normally recommend avoiding it. The color preferences RI governs how image colors will be rendered, by default, on all conversions between one color space and another. But you can override it at print time in the Print with Preview settings. If you have Relative Colorimetric set in color settings but choose Perceptual during printing, this may make your print's colors look different than the image colors looked on the screen because out of gamut colors get handled differently.

Now if you soft proof all your images before printing, you must also specify the RI in your soft proof setup (along with black point, etc.). If you were going to print with Perceptual & black point compensation, you'd want to make sure you make the same settings also when creating the custom soft proof parameters for your output profile. Mixing these up is to be avoided for sure.

Normally to keep things simple I'd say pick the same rendering intent in all places and don't switch it unless you need to for a specific image. If your intention is to soft proof your images and correct them before printing, then RC may be the best default choice for both settings. This will emphasize color accuracy. I'm only speculating, but I suspect Moab recommends printing with Perceptual because they assume that most people will not soft proof and correct images prior to printing.

It does have to be said that for many/most images, the differences probably will be slight and unimportant unless you are a detail fanatic like I am. But some images may contain a strong dose of out of gamut colors, and these will behave visibly differently in Relative Colorimetric vs. Perceptual. Most recommendations I've seen say that Perceptual and Relative Colorimetric are the two most useful RI's, but generally prefer Relative Colorimetric.

Sorry for the delay. Either will work but Relative Colorimetric is the more common setting for this as Royce has alread written. I would leave them both, contrary to Moab's suggestion but it shouldn't make a big difference.

Thanks guys - I'll change my Rendering Intent back to RC so everything will be consistent.

Royce - Yes, we were talking about the same thing. By Print Screen I was talking about the PS dialog box. I do have my Print Driver color management controls disabled.

Thanks again for the help.