Printing - Color Intent

[pjglad]

When I print in ON1 Photo Raw I can choose color intent (perceptual or relative colorimetric). This option is not available when I print in Affinity Photo. Why is that?

[walt.farrell]

It's there for me (Affinity Photo, on Windows), as you can see in the attached screenshot.

[pjglad]

I have a Mac. I do not have those options. Why is that? 

[walt.farrell]

Sorry, but someone who knows about Macs will have to answer that. I can only guess.

There is a tutorial about printing on Macs which demonstrates the process, and makes use of a Soft Proof layer which does have those options. If you follow the steps shown in that tutorial, using Soft Proof to see what your photo will look like, and applying additional adjustments underneath the soft proof layer to make it look correct, perhaps that eliminates the need to have the color intent option available while actually printing?

[pjglad]

Weird. Perhaps color intent has not been implemented for macs.

[v_kyr]

That's part of the color management system called ColorSync on Macs.

A rendering intent determines how a color management system handles color conversion from one color space to another. Different rendering intents use different rules to determine how the source colors are adjusted; for example, colors that fall inside the destination gamut may remain unchanged, or they may be adjusted to preserve the original range of visual relationships when translated to a smaller destination gamut. The result of choosing a rendering intent depends on the graphical content of documents and on the profiles used to specify color spaces. Some profiles produce identical results for different rendering intents.

Quote

You can select a rendering intent when you set color conversion options for the color management system, soft-proof colors, and print artwork:

Perceptual

Aims to preserve the visual relationship between colors so it’s perceived as natural to the human eye, even though the color values themselves may change. This intent is suitable for photographic images with lots of out-of-gamut colors. This is the standard rendering intent for the Japanese printing industry.

Saturation

Tries to produce vivid colors in an image at the expense of color accuracy. This rendering intent is suitable for business graphics like graphs or charts, where bright saturated colors are more important than the exact relationship between colors.

Relative Colorimetric

Compares the extreme highlight of the source color space to that of the destination color space and shifts all colors accordingly. Out-of-gamut colors are shifted to the closest reproducible color in the destination color space. Relative Colorimetric preserves more of the original colors in an image than Perceptual. This is the standard rendering intent for printing in North America and Europe.

Absolute Colorimetric

Leaves colors that fall inside the destination gamut unchanged. Out-of-gamut colors are clipped. No scaling of colors to destination white point is performed. This intent aims to maintain color accuracy at the expense of preserving relationships between colors and is suitable for proofing to simulate the output of a particular device. This intent is particularly useful for previewing how paper color affects printed colors.

Thus things here are usually available (burried) deeper from inside the printer driver's settings, when you use/specify there other (ColorSync managed) than the standard printer driver managed color handling. E.g. when you let instead the application to control and handle the color management instead of the printer here via specific defined/used ICC printer profiles.

[pjglad]

Thanks but I understand rendering intent. Unlike the windows version of AP, rendering intent for the Mac is set in preferences not in the Print routine which IMO is somewhat convoluted.

[R C-R]

8 hours ago, pjglad said:

Unlike the windows version of AP, rendering intent for the Mac is set in preferences not in the Print routine which IMO is somewhat convoluted.

If you mean this ...

... note that according to the built-in AP help topic Color Management:

Quote

In Affinity Photo, an opened file's color profile is honored by default.

{...}

The chosen profile will be used as the current working space and will be offered when creating new documents, or will be used if you choose to convert an opened file's color space (discarding its own color profile).

As I understand it, these are global default settings (including rendering intent) that only apply if the file has no embedded color profile, or for new documents & for profile conversions.

 

As @walt.farrell said, for color-accurate printing, Affinity Photo offers the Soft Proof adjustment, which does include its own rendering intent option. As mentioned in the video, that seems reasonable because the same document might be printed on different media at different times.

 

Please understand that I am in no way an expert on color management & this is just my interpretation of how all this works. Hopefully, someone with more expertise can explain it better.

[TomM1]

I will reopen this old thread because I still wonder why there is no rendering intent option in the print window (Mac).

Or does the intent set in preferences apply to printing.

But then why have rendering intent choices in the Soft Proof adjustment layer?

[nagoodman]

Thank you for reopening this thread because I am also wondering why there is no way to pick rendering intent in the print dialogue on a Mac. I have switched to AP and really do love the app but my files need to match previous files for clients when printed. And, I still haven't found out if picking rendering intent in the preferences affects all documents or just new documents. I don't understand why rendering intent is available on the Windows side in the print dialogue but not on the Mac. I hope this thread gets updated with new information.