Counter-Intuitive Color Management

I've been struggling with color management for a while, using Photoshop CS2, a Spyder for monitor calibration, etc. I shoot with a Canon 30D, process on an iMac G5, print on a Canon i960.

Despite my best efforts at creating monitor profiles, using paper/printer profiles, while the monitor portrays a close approximation of what I photographed, I could not get my prints to match the monitor.

As sort of a fluke, I changed the settings in Photoshop to allow the printer to do color management and set the printer utility so that the printer does the color management using ColorSync.

Incredible difference! Now the prints match the screen.

Has anybody else run across this?

Hmm. I will look into this a bit further.

brucea wrote in post #2049325
I've been struggling with color management for a while, using Photoshop CS2, a Spyder for monitor calibration, etc. I shoot with a Canon 30D, process on an iMac G5, print on a Canon i960.

Despite my best efforts at creating monitor profiles, using paper/printer profiles, while the monitor portrays a close approximation of what I photographed, I could not get my prints to match the monitor.

As sort of a fluke, I changed the settings in Photoshop to allow the printer to do color management and set the printer utility so that the printer does the color management using ColorSync.

Incredible difference! Now the prints match the screen.

Has anybody else run across this?

You have two options for making your prints. You can let PS manage the colors or you can let the printer do it. You would think that they would both give you the same results with everything else being equal, but in your case, that does not seem to have been the case. Just out of curiosity, when you were letting PS manage the color, what ICC profile were you using for the printer?

I used the ICC profile associated with the paper I was using. Most recently Ilford Galerie papers, with the profile downloaded from the Ilford website.

brucea wrote in post #2049947
I used the ICC profile associated with the paper I was using. Most recently Ilford Galerie papers, with the profile downloaded from the Ilford website.

And did you also have this same profile loaded by the i9900 when it was doing the color management?

This is in regard to an i960, not a i9900.

On a MAC, it is not possible to assign an ICC profile to a printer -- at least I cannot find it in the print dialog.

I do use the media type recommended by Ilford, which is one of the Canon papers.

I have done some checking of previous posts and have found that many have said that turning the color management of this model printer off does not seem to work. So, using the printer to do color management instead of Photoshop seems to be the solution. And ColorSync as the choice in one of the printer dialog boxes gives the best results.

brucea wrote in post #2050315
On a MAC, it is not possible to assign an ICC profile to a printer -- at least I cannot find it in the print dialog.

You can via the ColorSync Utility(OS X) in the Utilities folder.
This utility is definitely your friend.

Hint: play with the calculator.....