"Gary F. Pitel" wrote in message
When setting up a printer (Canon i4500 series) with Photoshop CS3 who should be responsible for the color management? The printer or Photoshop? Is there a tutorial on this or even just a good article? Thanks your help is appreciated.
My own preference is to have the printer manage the colors, setting the printer to the default settings for printing photographs. Test by printing a test image from a web site that contains test patches and skin tones.
If you find that the test image looks good as a print, but not so good on your screen, the problem is with your display, not the printer, and you need to calibrate your display, which can be done manually, or by using a screen calibration gadget such as the Spyder Pro or Eye One Display 2.
If there are no problems, I avoid any special calibration procedures. However, YMMV, particularly if you are using third party ink or paper.
If you are able to get good results from the above procedure, more power to you. If not, you have several courses of action:
1) locate a canned profile for your printer / paper combination. This can be a good course to follow, provided you are sticking to the mfg’s materials.
2) use a test strip to manually configure your printer to print a good neutral tone scale and skin tones.
http://www.curvemeister.com/downloads/TestStrip/digital_test _strip.htm . The test strip procedure will save you a lot of paper and ink.
3) Have a company calibrate your printer, or use a device to do so – both of these can be an expensive proposition – more costly than printer and ink combined, and I don’t really recommend them at the present time.
4) Punt. Have an online service do your prints, while you sort out the problem with your printer. Send them some test patterns that you can compare with your printer’s output, and try step 2.
—
Mike Russell – www.curvemeister.com