Duotone workflow problem (Warning: includes printing with color management off)
Hello all, A customer came in recently with a duotone JPEG image to be printed. The image opened in Photoshop CS2 on one of our Mac workstations without any profile mismatch complaint. Our PS Color Settings are U.S. Prepress Defaults with its AdobeRGB (1998) editing space, and likewise our Onyx RIP is configured to "expect" arriving files to be in the Adobe RGB (1998) color space, although others, such a sRGB, ProPhoto RGB, etc. can be chosen if needed. Without regard to the image's duotone mode, I selected the desired media in Photoshop's print dialog box and printed it from the Mac workstation via Ethernet to our Onyx Productionhouse RIP. Where it arrived in the RIP queue it was composed with other jobs and printed. After the file was printed we could see that something had obviously gone wrong, as evidenced by scum dots in the image's white border, and less obviously in the image itself. But it gets worse... All subsequent images printed from the aforementioned workstation displayed the same problem. The RIP's Preflight displayed the values of the scum dots in white borders as: 2.0% Cyan, 3.1% Magenta, and 2.4% Yellow. I finally discovered that the duotone image had changed Photoshop's "Output" from "No Color Management" to "Let Printer Determine Colors", a setting that proved to be "sticky", as it was applied to all subsequent prints. The change wasn't visible, as it was hidden under the drop-down "Output" setting. In my defense, I can't recall ever printing a duotone image before this unhappy event. Has anyone else had this occur? Thanks, Richard -- Richard D. Warner Warner Graphics, Inc. 22 Washington Street Camden, Maine 04843 Tel (207) 236-2065 Tel (800) 875-2422 Fax (207) 230-2422
On 9 Mar 2016, at 23:40, Richard D. Warner <richard@warnergraphics.com> wrote:
Has anyone else had this occur?
Doubt it as you can’t save a genuine duotone as a jpeg :) If it was a jpeg then the duotone must have been converted to RGB. -- Martin Orpen Idea Digital Imaging Ltd
Right you are, Martin, of course. The duotone image was a Photoshop file (.psd) that was accompanied by a RGB JPEG of another image. Martin Orpen wrote:
On 9 Mar 2016, at 23:40, Richard D. Warner <richard@warnergraphics.com> wrote:
Has anyone else had this occur?
Doubt it as you can’t save a genuine duotone as a jpeg :)
If it was a jpeg then the duotone must have been converted to RGB.
-- Richard D. Warner Warner Graphics, Inc. 22 Washington Street Camden, Maine 04843 Tel (207) 236-2065 Tel (800) 875-2422 Fax (207) 230-2422
On 10 Mar 2016, at 00:12, Richard D. Warner <richard@warnergraphics.com> wrote:
Right you are, Martin, of course. The duotone image was a Photoshop file (.psd) that was accompanied by a RGB JPEG of another image.
Don’t think I’ve *printed* to a RIP for at least a decade now. As the recent flurry of posts shows, t’s just too risky. All drag and drop here. PDFs or bitmaps get dumped in their respective print queue folders and there’s no nasty surprises — they either print or get held because of preflight failures in each queue. Giving people “options” like you get in the print dialog is giving them additional opportunities to make mistakes :( And I would think that duotones must be especially risky to push through a print driver? They’re already good to go, why risk another transformation? Much safer to wrap them up in a PDF via InDesign so that you can check that the channels and colour names are in good shape before dumping them on the RIP. -- Martin Orpen Idea Digital Imaging Ltd
Was thinking the same thing…..who *prints* to a RIP/virutal printer when it’s much safer/simpler to either drop the file in a hot folder or upload the file directly to the RIP? I don’t know about Onyx Production House….but our Onyx Thrive system has a browser UI that lets you submit/upload a file directly to the RIP from any workstation. Regards, Terry Wyse
On Mar 9, 2016, at 8:17 PM, Martin Orpen <martin@idea-digital.com> wrote:
Don’t think I’ve *printed* to a RIP for at least a decade now. As the recent flurry of posts shows, t’s just too risky.
Terry and Martin, Onyx Productionhouse has a browser interface as well, and we save many jobs such as POP and tradeshow graphics involving text and images from InDesign and Quark as Acrobat files which can be dragged and dropped or printed to the RIP. However, almost all the work I do personally is fine art reproduction, which, despite a color-managed workflow, almost always requires at least some tweaking to perfect the color. Because our customers usually order prints of a specific size and white border, I create the file with the requisite border and the print's dimensions in its file name and archive it on DVD, together with a target (BAT) print, that are used for future reprints. Although, my customer's duotone was a photograph, he wanted it printed on Arches watercolor paper, so it was printed from my Mac in the usual manner when it went pear shaped. My intent of my original post was to see if others had encountered the "stickyness" of Photoshop's output settings and to alert those who had not. How the hog ate the cabbage, if you will. I now leave the Output/Color Management drop-down menu with Color Management selected so any changes in Color Handling can be seen. Cheers, Richard Terence Wyse wrote:
Was thinking the same thing…..who *prints* to a RIP/virutal printer when it’s much safer/simpler to either drop the file in a hot folder or upload the file directly to the RIP?
I don’t know about Onyx Production House….but our Onyx Thrive system has a browser UI that lets you submit/upload a file directly to the RIP from any workstation.
Regards, Terry Wyse
On Mar 9, 2016, at 8:17 PM, Martin Orpen <martin@idea-digital.com> wrote:
Don’t think I’ve *printed* to a RIP for at least a decade now. As the recent flurry of posts shows, t’s just too risky.
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-- Richard D. Warner Warner Graphics, Inc. 22 Washington Street Camden, Maine 04843 Tel (207) 236-2065 Tel (800) 875-2422 Fax (207) 230-2422
participants (3)
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Martin Orpen
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Richard D. Warner
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Terence Wyse