Many Mac users find that the ICC profiles for their printer stop appearing in applications such as Adobe Lightroom Classic and Adobe Photoshop. They’re often advised to delete and reinstall the printer, or to reset the macOS printing system, but in some cases the problem comes back and they have to delete and reinstall the printer again. That gets old fast, so I worked out a way to resolve this issue permanently.
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Artists and designers are taught the conventional wisdom that design for digital displays should be in RGB color, and design for print should be in CMYK color. While that’s generally true, there’s a gray area that causes some confusion for some, especially beginners. I explain the difference between these workflows in my article on CreativePro.com.
What’s the difference between RGB and CMYK printing?
If you print color target images because you build printer profiles, and you’ve been frustrated that the No Color Management option is missing from the Print dialog box in Adobe Photoshop CS5, you can breathe a little easier now. No, make that a lot easier. Adobe has released the Adobe Color Printer Utility, specifically designed to print RGB TIFF color profiling targets without the risk of having the test swatch colors distorted by a color management system.
If you use an Epson Stylus Photo/Epson Stylus Pro printer in Mac OS X and you save printer settings as printer presets (a recommended practice), there may be times when you choose a preset and realize that some of the settings mysteriously deviate from the way you saved them. For example, you might swear that you saved the Printer Color Management setting as No Color Management, but it somehow turns itself back on when you apply a preset. Other symptoms are finding the wrong paper type or color settings selected. And even more mysteriously, you might notice that sometimes it does remember the same settings that it forgot on another occasion.
I don’t know if this applies to all printers in OS X, but presets for Epson photo printers are quite sensitive to the conditions under which they were created—and unexpectedly, this can include the state of settings that are outside the Print dialog itself. Pay particular attention to the settings in the Page Setup dialog box.
For example, I once discovered that reason my Epson 3800 printer presets would not remember my color settings was that the current paper source did not match the paper source that was in effect when I created the preset! I’ve had to make two versions of my favorite presets: One preset for when I’m using the automatic paper feeder, and another for when I’m using the manual feed slot. The settings saved in each preset are exactly the same; the only difference is which paper feed is selected when I save each preset. Of course, I have to mention the paper source in each preset’s name, so that I know which one to select.
I have not yet tested if this behavior is the same in Windows.
This interaction between paper source and printer presets is yet another reason to make sure you always check the Page Setup dialog box before you print, and especially before you print a Photoshop document for the first time. In Page Setup, the selected printer, paper size, and paper source affect what you get to do in the Print dialog box. If you don’t get Page Setup right from the beginning, you’re setting yourself up for confusion when you print.
Lightroom. If you’re trying to get Epson printer driver settings to stick in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom on Mac OS X when you save a Lightroom printer preset, the trick is to not use the Epson printer driver presets. Instead, leave the printer preset set to Standard, make the printer driver settings, and then save the Lightroom printer preset.
A friend of mine was printing on an Epson Stylus Pro 3800, and as the paper tried to load the printer displayed an “Incorrect paper size” error even though the size of the photo paper matched the Paper Size selected in Page Setup. And it worked just a few minutes earlier.
My friend was trying to print multiple images on a sheet, in multiple passes. As a troubleshooting step, I turned the paper around and inserted it the other way. It worked. Why would the printer accept the paper size one way but not the other?
I came up with a theory about it. Unlike my older Epson, the 3800 can perform automatic nozzle checks and head alignments, and can sense paper sizes. I have read that it can do all this because of an optical sensor built into the printer. Now, my friend was printing images with large areas of black near the edge, and she was printing borderless. I believe that when she loaded paper that had a large black area extending about halfway across the paper, the optical sensor saw all that black and decided that the paper’s edge didn’t actually begin until the white area appeared.
I have also run into a similar problem where the Epson 3800 will simply say “Paper error” and tells you to press the paper feed button and try again. In this case I am feeding an edge that is partially printed along the leading edge, though not completely black and with a thin empty border along the edge. Even then, the 3800 senses a misfeed even though there’s nothing physically wrong with the sheet. Inserting a blank sheet loads successfully.
This behavior indicates that the optical sensor is designed to think of paper as a broad expanse of empty white, and it may incorrectly believe that long dark areas are not paper and indicate a paper feed misalignment. If you’ve previously experimented with multiple-pass printing on another Epson printer model, you may not be able to make it work on Epson printers that try to sense blank sheets optically.
Some reading on the Web indicates that certain Epson models are able to turn off this automatic page size sensing, but that feature doesn’t seem to be available on the 3800.
conrad chavez | blog 