Differences between Color Management Engines

[mikling]

I have been printing exlcusively by using the Output from Qimage.

However there are instances where I would like to use some convenient programs where using Photoshop etc. Is simply too much of a pain. Examples are like greeting card applications, Invites etc. These programs simply do not manage color and yet the cardstock and their properties vary widely so that colors are not consistent.

So I have been experimenting with printing outside of Qimage and Photoshop or all programs that manages color and here is what I am finding.

I used a reference image with embedded sRGB. I am using an Epson R260 with Windows XP SP3. Where possible, the same rendering intents are used.

I have found that all Adobe applications produce identical output with the same ICC. This includes Lightroom. That is to be expected.

Qimage produces the identical image with slight variations in sharpness due to differences in sharpening. The color tones however are identical. Not surprising.

ACDSEE Pro 2.5 does not produce the same image as the previous applications when Color management is turned on.

If I turn off color management and let the print driver in Windows handle color management, I get the same results as using letting ACDSEE Pro 2.5 manage the color. Hmmmm....that's interesting. The driver in Windows does not have any rendering intents.

I then take the image, insert it into a MS Word document and then print it, using the same ICM options and letting the driver handle the ICM.
I get the same colors as ACDSEE pro as previous.

When I print the same image using no ICM or custom profiles the colors are distinctly different. The differences between the output of Adobe, Qimage and letting the other apps handle the colors is actually not very large but enough to notice a difference side by side.

It appears that there are two renditions to this. One camp has the output just like Adobe. Since the printed image and monitor image from Adobe apps appear very close to the monitor I am going to assume this camp is more accurate. However, the other camp is interesting since while different, they are consistent amongst themselves as well.

This leads me to wonder what is going on here? Are there two distinct different standards or maybe ACDSEE is using the windows engine and Adobe and Qimage use a different engine or standard?

Does anyone know or shed some light on what is going on?

 

[Grandad35]

It appears that there are two renditions to this. One camp has the output just like Adobe. Since the printed image and monitor image from Adobe apps appear very close to the monitor I am going to assume this camp is more accurate. However, the other camp is interesting since while different, they are consistent amongst themselves as well.

This leads me to wonder what is going on here? Are there two distinct different standards or maybe ACDSEE is using the windows engine and Adobe and Qimage use a different engine or standard?

Does anyone know or shed some light on what is going on?

It's not surprising that Qimage and Adobe give the same results - as I understand color management, the rules for applying a profile are well defined by the International Color Consortium and not open to different interpretations. Variations in print sharpening are outside the scope of color management.

Likewise, Windows is completely "color stupid" and makes no attempt to address the issue - any color management through Windows must be handled by either an outside program (e.g. Photoshop or Qimage) or by the printer driver itself (which will obviously vary between printers).

A reasonable person would think that the many gigabytes of MS bloatware would contain a proper color management system, but MS just doesn't appear to be interested. In fact, they are going backward - XP has a superior system to Vista. At least XP would load and retain the hardware LUT for the monitor. If you have calibrated your monitor, Vista routinely corrupts the display's hardware LUT, and it is necessary to run a program to reload it each time that you launch any color aware program to get accurate display colors. They claim to have fixed the problem, but the fix apparently only works if you live on Mars.

 

[mikling]

Grandad35, thanks for the warning on Vista. All the more reason to keep Windows XP running.

 

[zlisik]

This is very interesting.

have you tried any other programs since? I'm curious how GIMP would measure up.

 

[Smile]

Likewise, Windows is completely "color stupid" and makes no attempt to address the issue - any color management through Windows must be handled by either an outside program (e.g. Photoshop or Qimage) or by the printer driver itself (which will obviously vary between printers).

A reasonable person would think that the many gigabytes of MS bloatware would contain a proper color management system, but MS just doesn't appear to be interested. In fact, they are going backward - XP has a superior system to Vista. At least XP would load and retain the hardware LUT for the monitor. If you have calibrated your monitor, Vista routinely corrupts the display's hardware LUT, and it is necessary to run a program to reload it each time that you launch any color aware program to get accurate display colors. They claim to have fixed the problem, but the fix apparently only works if you live on Mars.

I second that. It is recomemded to use ICC aware program for the same reason like you say. If you let windows CMM (printer driver) manage color than color will be a bit different. Adobe uses more real world CMM where windows just sticks by the rules of ICC.

Grandad is also correct about Vista, while some computers seems to work fine, others are unable to work right. The ICC profiles gets removed after UAC (black screen) asking for confirmation apears. Therefore you have to manualy load the profiles again and again. You can use DisplayProfile freeware to load it yourself.

http://www.xrite.com/ph_product_overview.aspx?ID=842&Action=Support&SoftwareID=539

I also contacted X-rite about making the program to auto-load the profile. They refused to update the program to do this. So not only MS does crap software but X-rite too. BTW SP2 on Vista does not fix this.

 

[crenedecotret]

I'm currently running Windows 7 Enterprise RTM, 64 bit edition.
No problems with UAC shifting the display colors (at least as far as the monitor is concerned)

The Gamma loader that comes with the Spyder2Pro works fine (my background changes significantly when the LUT table is loaded, so I notice UAC messing with anything).
I had no problem with Vista SP1 either... I do remember a color shift when UAC kicked in before vista SP1.

You do however need to go in Color Management and set your device profile to your ICC for your monitor and the viewing profile to "System Default (WCS for SRGB viewing conditions)"
This need to be done for both the user and system defaults... maybe this is the key?

My prints are spot on using Windows ICM or Photoshop elements (monitor set to 6500K, 130 cd/m2), profiles generated with Profile Prism 6.5
To get good results I must select the printer profile as default from the printer properties and then select ICM in the canon driver (tested this with an epson too).

I've tried the demo for ACDSee pro.... also had problems with colors. I'm using Faststone Image Viewer now.. works great and it's free

 

[ronzie]

I have a Canon S82o that has nice quality using OEM products. I also use an application that soft proofs but does not control control printer color but leaves that to the driver. Canon Tech Support responds not to use the ICM enable in manual color management in the driver. This driver does not provide a dropdown for user profile selection.

I would prefer a printing application where like PS I can totally disable printer driver color management and let the application provide printer color correction driving it raw by the user picking the profile. Will QImage do that?

The editor features provide much of the features in QImage Pro so I'm looking at QImage Lite.

 

[Grandad35]

I have a Canon S82o that has nice quality using OEM products. I also use an application that soft proofs but does not control control printer color but leaves that to the driver. Canon Tech Support responds not to use the ICM enable in manual color management in the driver. This driver does not provide a dropdown for user profile selection.

I would prefer a printing application where like PS I can totally disable printer driver color management and let the application provide printer color correction driving it raw by the user picking the profile. Will QImage do that?

The editor features provide much of the features in QImage Pro so I'm looking at QImage Lite.

Qimage works similarly to PS. It also keeps its own copy of the parameters that are sent to each printer driver (in case you have more than one printer available - either local or on the network), so changes to the driver settings in other programs don't affect Qimage.

It has a free trial, so try it and see if you like it. If you print more than one photo at a time, you'll especially love its ability to handle batch printing, even with different size or multiple images on a page in the same batch.

 

[ronzie]

QImage did solve my problem. I used the Canon I960 profiles with the S820 driver color management killed. There is just a very small increase in saturation in perceptual mode compared to the soft proof. that I can take care of easily in the Canon driver. Hues are right on. In the a.m. I'll register the Pro version just to get their soft proof feature.

Soft proofing in both my editor and QImage match. My monitor is a hardware calibrated NEC P221W with their Spectraview version of the Eye-One unit.

Thanks for input.