Pixelmator Forums

Hi,
I've been using Pixelmator since day one and I love it. But the only thing I haven't been able to figure out yet is custom profiles.

I'm using fine art natural textured paper (315gsm) which I've had custom profiled for use with my Epson R2400 printer. The supplier (Fotospeed) did this free for me and supplied instructions on how to use my new profile with Photoshop CS. I've got the profile installed on my iMac and I can get some excellent printing results from Photoshop CS.

But unfortunately it ends there. If I use Pixelmator to assign or match color profiles, the results are less pleasing. Prints come out very dark and 'muddy' unlike anything on the screen. The procedure in Pixelmator I'm following is as follows:

I'm opening an image as normal, and then going to the IMAGE > Asign Profile menu item.
I'm then selecting my custom profile from the drop down menu and clicking 'OK'.
At this stage, the colours of the image on the screen go slightly lighter
I then go to print.
Under colour options, I'm selecting 'no colour management'
I'm setting paper type as 'plain', and setting quality to 'fine'

The final 2 stages are the same as in Photoshop. Can anyone see where I might be going wrong?

I'd really like to be able to print my prints from Pixelmator. My 30 day demo version of Photoshop CS expires in a few hours time, so this is the only outstanding issue I need to sort out to become a complete Pixelmator convert!

Thanks in advance,
Will.

As nearly a month has gone by without any response, I thought I should bump this thread back up again.

It seems like Pixelmator is disregarding any applied profiles, and so when colorsync is turned OFF under the print settings, very muddy prints are being produced.

I cannot identify if this is a bug in the Pixelmator application or something I'm doing wrong. Eitherway, Photoshop managed colour profiles fine, and tonight I've downloaded Aperture and this is also producing perfect print outs using my profiles.

Any feedback or advice would be most appreciated. This is the only stumbling block I've come across in what is otherwise an excellent application.

Hi Will,

you seem to have a complete misconception of how color management works. The way you tried to set up Pixelmator, it cannot work. Two basic mistakes:

1. Never ASSIGN a printer profile to an image. "Assigning" means you tell the CMS (color management system) to interpret the same image RGB values in a different way, since you simply overwrite the existing profile of the image by another profile which contains different instructions for the CMS on how to interpret the RGB values. This means in effect that you modify the colors of the image, exactly what you do not want to do when you try to keep your colors consistent with color management. The only situation where you'll want to assign a profile is when you know that the RGB values of an image are to be interpreted in the color space of this profile, but the profile itself is not attached to the image for whatever reason.

In every other situation, what you'll want to do is to CONVERT or MATCH the image from one color space to another, e.g. from the working space to the printing space. In this case, the CMS does not only attach a new profile to the image, but also actually modifies the RGB values of the image such that the resulting colors remain the same, but expressed in the new color space – which is what color management is all about.

However, you do not need to perform this conversion manually; the beauty of Mac OS X is that it has consistent, system-wide color management built-in, and will do this automatically for you. Here is where your second mistake comes in:

2. Why on earth do you switch off printer color management if that is exactly what you want to use???? The correct way to deal with your situation is the following, depending on whether you always want to use this profile with your printer, or only sometimes:

a) always Log in to an admin account (I hope for your sake that you don't do your daily work in an admin account), launch /Applications/Utilities/ColorSync Utility, go to the Devices pane and locate your printer. For each setting your printer offers you can specify a profile; it is here that you specify the specific printer profile you've got. After you did that, go back to your standard (non-admin) working account and make sure ColorSync is turned on when you print. Then Mac OS X will do everything for you automatically and your printed images should look fine.

b) sometimes If you want to use your profile only sometimes, do not permanently configure it as in a), but rather specify it in the Color Matching > Profile: popup of the print dialog sheet. Of course, ColorSync must again be turned on. Then your profile will be used for this print job only. PLEASE NOTE: due to a current bug in Leopard, this will only work if your profile is installed in /Library/ColorSync/Profiles, and not in your home folder, i.e. /Users/your_home_folder/Library/ColorSync/Profiles. If you install it in your home folder, the profile will show up in the popup menu, but selecting it will have no effect.

Finally, don't forget to switch off any printer internal color processing if your Epson driver offers you this option. You won't want to have your image color processed twice, by Mac OS X and within the printer.

Hope that helps.

Uli

I have been a Photoshop on Windows user for many years and have a reasonable understanding of colour management for printing photographic images.

However, I'm new to both the Mac and Pixelmator and am really struggling with this topic. The documentation is very weak in this regard.

Like the original poster I have custom profiles also from Fotospeed (they come highly recommended :) and in Photoshop on Windows I know that I have to disable Colour Management in the printer settings at the Windows level and ensure that Photoshop is set to manage the colour, I then select the relevant printer profile and bosh... it simply works.

However, I am very confused on the Mac. I am simply trying to print an image that has no embedded profile on a paper using a custom profile.

What I have been unable to find anywhere are simple instructions to achieve this and as another post on this forum states the colour management implementation doesn't follow standards.

Is it possible to get a couple of simple workflow descriptions for (say):

1. Printing an image using a custom profile where the original image has no embedded profile
2. The same as 1 but where it does (i.e. sRGB)

I would like to ask that this also includes the print dialogue steps too.

I hope I have not asked too much?

Cheers - Robert

rswift wrote:
The reason for this is that on a Mac, basically everything should work "automagically". At least that's the theory.

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I take it that these a printer profiles for the paper Fotospeed sells, correct?

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I know that's how it's usually done in Windows, but this is really a weird, archaic way of doing it.

Long ago, when PC technology just started, word processors actually came with their own printer drivers! That sounds completely ridiculous today, but back then, there was no standard mechanism provided by an operating system to print letters graphically (i.e. not using the internal fonts of the printer). So if a word processor wanted to produce nice-looking letters (well, sort of ... ) of a specific font family, it had to use its own driver.

Of course, today that's a task of the operating system, since every application we use should be able to print to every connected printer in a basically identical way.

Now, if you think about it, it's exactly the same with color management. Every application should produce correct colors, not just Photoshop. Therefore, the correct place for printer color management is in the operating system and not in Photoshop, just as the operating system is the correct place for a printer driver, and not the word processor.

That this is generally not the way it is done on Windows is simply because color management on an operating system level does hardly work on Windows at all. But it does on a Mac.

So on a Mac, forget about switching off system-wide color management (called "ColorSync" on a Mac), and forget about using an application instead. (A 100% Mac OS X compliant application such as Pixelmator won't even offer printing color management on an application level.)

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That's exactly the same on a Mac. The only difference being that you select the printer profile in the system-wide Print dialog sheet, where it belongs to.

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Now, Mac or not, it is important to realize that this will never work reliably on any system. Color management is about transforming colors from one well-defined color space into another. If the original color space is unknown, color management cannot and will not work, period. The result you'll get will be completely arbitrary, although it will be reproducible as long as you always use the same method of printing (since computers are determined machines).

So whenever you get an image without an embedded profile, the first thing you must do for color management to work is to assign a profile to define the color space. Of course, if you don't know which profile to assign, you must make an educated guess (images from Windows users or the Internet = probably sRGB, images from Mac users = probably Generic RGB, images from high quality cameras = probably Adobe RGB (1998), 16 bit images from RAW cameras = probably ProPhoto RGB). You can try and assign several profiles one after another and check which profile produces an image that "looks right", then stick to that.

Again, this has nothing to do with Windows, Mac or Photoshop, it's a basic requirement of color management in general. You may have been lucky so far since many color management related Windows apps (probably including Photoshop on Windows, I don't know) assume sRGB for images without a profile (they must assume something to convert from), and you might have mostly dealt with images from Windows users which also were meant to be in sRGB. But again, that's pure chance, and it won't work on a Mac that assumes Generic RGB for untagged images instead.

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I don't know which standards you refer to, but ColorSync is the standard on a Mac, and it's 100% ICC compliant.

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As I tried to explain, there's no such color management workflow. Assign the correct profile to the image first.

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Very simple:

1. In a user account with admin permissions, put your printer profiles into /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/. Launch ColorSync Utility (in /Applications/Utilities/), go to the Devices pane and assign one of your profiles as the default profile for your printer. This is the profile that will be used for your printer unless you specify another one explicitly.

2. In your regular user account (which hopefully is one without admin permissions ...), just print. Everything will be taken care of automatically as long as you want to use your default printer profile.

3. If you want to use another than the default printer profile for a specific print job, do the following:
a) In the Print dialog sheet, choose Color Matching from the pop-up in the middle. (If you only see a very small Print dialog sheet with only two pop-ups (Printer and Presets) and a few buttons, click on the down arrow button right of the Printer pop-up to switch to the advanced Print dialog sheet.)
b) In the Color Matching pane that will be displayed, make sure ColorSync is selected and choose your alternate profile in the Profile pop-up. Disregard the warning that this profile might not suit your printer. Then print. Note that this setting is not persistent, i.e. you'll have to repeat it every time you print. However, you can save this setting in a printing preset (in the Presets pop-up in the upper half of the Print dialog sheet). Printing presets are persistent, the last one used is selected by default. This way, you can easily build specific presets for specific papers etc.

4. If you want to soft-proof your image, don't click the Print button after selecting the profile. Instead, click PDF > Open PDF in Preview in the lower left. In the Preview document window that opens, check Soft Proof in the lower left, and you'll see the image as it will be printed with this profile.

Hope that helps.

Bye

Uli

Hello Uli,

Many thanks for such a comprehensive and rapid reply, it is much appreciated and I have learnt a lot.

However, I think this has highlighted why I am having problems...

I have moved my printer profiles to the /Library/ColorSync/Profiles directory, they are owned by root in the admin group and all users have read access (write for owner & group only). The files had a .icm extension and I have renamed this to ".icc".

When I select "Colour Management" in the print dialogue (any application, not just Pixelmator) then check the ColorSync option I never see a popup to select the profiles?! I guess this is why I'm puzzled about my inability to make it work...

I have done the assignment of profiles to the device (Epson 2100) in the ColorSync utility but this doesn't seem to have made a difference... I've tried the "Verify" option and the profiles are all reported as being valid...

It may be "automagic" on some Macs but I clearly don't appear to have sprinkled sufficient quantities of pixie dust on my Macbook Pro just yet

The papers from Fotospeed are excellent quality and the service they provide is also fantastic.

Any ideas would be welcome...

Cheers - Robert.

Hi Robert,

rswift wrote:
You're welcome.

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This shouldn't even be necessary, but it doesn't hurt, either.

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Ouch – it might be that you have a buggy printer driver - I know some Epsons had an issue there, but thought it was fixed by now …

Let us make sure we are talking about exactly the same print option. The pop-up in the middle of the Print panel has 4 sections, separated by gray horizontal lines
1. Application specific options, named according to the app name (e.g. "Pixelmator")
2. Mac OS X system-wide options (these should start with "Layout" and end with "Scheduler")
3. Printer driver specific options – the entries here depend completely on the printer driver used
4. Summary - a summary of all settings

Now, what I'm talking about is section 2. Directly beneath Layout, you should see an entry called Color Matching. If you do, the pop-up for selecting a color profile should be displayed if you select Color Matching. If you don't, then you unfortunately experience the Epson driver bug/Mac OS X incompatibility.

Typically, Epson provides its own color management option in section 3, often called something like Color Management. Typically, within this options pane you can, besides other settings, select between Epson Color Controls, ColorSync and No Color Adjustment. Last time I tried with an Epson printer, the ColorSync setting just didn't work with Leopard.

So if you find that you don't have the Color Matching entry in section 2, chances are that unfortunately you have a dysfunctional driver.

There are workarounds by editing Mac OS X plist configuration files, however, these are simply too complicated to describe here.

An easier workaround would be to use the Gutenprint driver for your Epson printer. Is a Gutenprint driver available on Mac OS X for your Epson model (assuming you installed the Gutenprint drivers)? The Gutenprint drivers work just fine with ColorSync. Even if you don't want to use the Gutenprint driver permanently, at least you could use it to verify that your printer profile does work and that it's the Epson printer driver that is the problem.

I'm sorry you ran into this. It's really Epson's fault, they've known about this issue for a long time, but they don't seem to care.

Bye

Uli

Uli,

You have solved my problem! Thank you... I zapped the Epson driver, used the Gutenprint driver (downloaded the latest from the Internet) and I now have the "Color Matching" menu you mention, in fact I can see several printer features that I've never known on Windows...

The only thing I now need to solve is how to have multiple profiles per printer device, because I use several paper types... if you know how to do this then I would be delighted to hear, otherwise I'll keep hunting

Many thanks once again, I hope this thread is useful to others too

Cheers - Robert.

rswift wrote:
Glad to hear!

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Since I don't know this specific printer, I don't know about specific options the Gutenprint driver might or might not offer for this model.

However, a generic method that should also work with your printer is to save an appropriately named printer preset (in the Presets pop-up in the upper half) for each of your paper types. Select the appropriate printer profile in the Color Matching pane via the Profile pop-up, and also set other paper specific settings apart from color management to the value that's appropriate for the specific paper type, then save all these settings with the Save as… entry in the Presets pop-up.

Then, when you use a different paper type, simply switch from one preset to the other. This should work.

Bye

Uli