Horrible Problem With Adobe Color Printing Utility

[pharmacist]

A friend of mine, who wanted a profile produced, ask me why it is almost difficult to print the target properly using Adobe Color Printing Utility under Mac OS X. The problem is row A being cut off from the paper.

Using Photoshop Windows it is possible to get it right (borderless, no expansion, at 360 dpi, no color management), but Photoshop Mac does not allow no color management, causing the colors already being corrected by either the printer driver or Photoshop and ACPU does not do the job properly (cutting off row A from my target file).

Can somebody tell me how to print WITHOUT any color management, borderless without expansion on standard A4 paper and certainly rows being cut off from the print ?

 

[Tudor]

If you work with Qimage and select Prtr - Off ... I think it prints with no color management. Is that right?



Qimage should work on Mac according to their download page: "No, we do not offer a Mac version but QU runs well under Fusion and Parallels."
http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage-u/downloads.htm

 

[pharmacist]

I was able to run Qimage on Virtualbox in Mac to get the profile printed properly. I don't understand ACPU: it is very difficult to get a borderless print without expansion on paper.

 

[Tudor]

Does the expansion affect something else besides size?

 

[pharmacist]

Yes, the image seems to be shifted towards the right, causing a small strip of the last row being cut off the print. Now: the reason why I need borderless without expansion is the very design of my target file to put as much as possible color patches on a single sheet of paper, while still being able to read this patches using my Colormunki. It should be printed at 360 dpi, borderless, no expansion and any color management disabled in both printer and the printing software.

 

[Tudor]

I printed targets using both ACPU and Qimage. Used borderless in the driver, and with the expansion set to the 3rd degree I had to include in the target a border of 4 (-M4). That way I get a border of 2mm in the printed target.

@pharmacist I saw a video on youtube where someone (you, I think) used a homemade gliding system for colormunki: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RoxKe7cBvQ The gliding system adds to the distance between the sensor and printed target. Doesn't that affect the reading?

 

[Smile]

The ACPU is joke, made to see how tolerant people are and how much they care about printing targets to begin with. on windows it does not allow to edit margins and is unusable.

Then again adobe never made x64 bit adobe engine for 64 bit systems. They removed "no color management" from photoshop because APPLE screwed it up in their OS and to be safe they removed it from windows too.

So the only way to have repeatable color is to use Win7, Win XP. No other OS reliable - believe me I tested them all.

 

[Smile]

I was able to run Qimage on Virtualbox in Mac to get the profile printed properly. I don't understand ACPU: it is very difficult to get a borderless print without expansion on paper.

using virtual system is not a solution since the virtual system passes data to host OS anyway.

 

[palombian]

It took me some time to print a test chart with ACPU (on Win8.1), because I did not understand that you had to change the printer settings manually (mainly quality, and color: manual, use profiles NONE ).
After that the produced profile was correct.
Wonder what ACPU does anyway.

@Smile: what are the reasons for Win8 behaving different from Win7 ?

 

[Smile]

@Smile: what are the reasons for Win8 behaving different from Win7 ?

Same as WinVista - color management is not stable. Maybe they will fix it.