Colour Mis-managed by AfPub or Printer?

[Chris26]

Please be aware, I have had plenty of experience managing digital colour and profiling down through the years.  So this situation I have is a little baffling and cost me days and days of wasting toner and paper.  First image you see is the test image, second image is setting driver colour management policy. 

Workflow:  Set Application to same colour workspace as imported images, set Application driver to define colours to the printer, set printer driver to No colour managemnt, or in this case to 'NONE'.  From the beginning I got blues turning to purples, I am aware that this can be corrected by allowing for 30% differnce between magenta and cyan etc, greens were washed out and colour saturation was rather muted on prints, Blues were not well defined though acceptable in actual images. Countless hours and 30 pages later I decided to do the unorthodox.  I kept all the app settings but set the printer driver to ALSO manage colours.  Perfect Prints, saturated colours, no blues going to purples, greens perfect and shadows even better.

I am mystified.  Can anyone help me out on this please?  What I should add is that we now have afiniity and the printer managing colour, double conversion, and this is the opposite of every rule in the colour management book.

What is also important is that I used the Adobe Colour Utility Software to print the same image, and the resut was exactly the same colour for colour as when Afinity controls the colour output and the printer is set to NONE.  The Adobe utility, for those who are unaware, is a stand alone package for creating icc profiles with some hardware profiling device, it bypasses all colour management policies that might be within microsoft and any application and with the printer set to 'No Colour Management.  If Affinity was truly in control here of managing colour then there would, at the very, least have been some noticeable difference in at least one colour or one tone, at the very least.  I tested loads of different papers and different settings and can only conclude that I am at a loss to explain how, no matter what affinity's settings, the printer gave me the purples as purples the blues as blues and, 2 of 3 greens as correct with better colour saturation.  I have not tried setting the printer ONLY as controlling colour with affinity set to 'Let Driver Manage colour' since I a fed up with wasting toner at this moment.

 

[walt.farrell]

Did you try soft-proofing using the appropriate ICC profile for your printer and paper?

That would be needed if your going to have an Affinity application do the color management, I think.

There are a couple of Affinity Photo tutorials on printing and soft-proofing in the Color Management tutorials that should be relevant.

[Chris26]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

That would be needed if your going to have an Affinity application do the color management, I think.

Hallo Walt,  I think you misunderstand me.  I am not comparing print with screen at all, this is about affinity producng the same colours and tones as the adobe utility which as I described above by-passes all colour management, not forgetting that it was not until I de-selected the 'NO Colour management' in the printer and assigned an RGB interpretation while the affinity print option was ALSO selected to Affinty manage colours, that everything printed exactly as it should have done.  Blues did not print purple and Greens printed in their seperate tonal range and colours were NOT muted at all.  This manner of printing is simply disastrous in a print workflow.  After all I have been printing with epson 3800 for years using soft proofing and special ICC profiles for different papers.   I understand how it should go, I was having trouble with the colours for two weeks simply because I followed the correct procedures.  I deviated and did something silly and it all worked out fine.  This should not have happened as per mentioned above.  I should add that I am talking only about the Laser printer here, I may have forgotten to add this.  Though it is in the screen shot sorry.

[Chris26]

SOLVED.....Problem is that HP have re-defined colour management words.  Their stupid methodology - I will not be the first to have mis-understood their ridiculous setup.  Below is how they describe their settings, this is not in my manual, I found this on another machine.  You see how NONE and s'RGB conflict, and how AdobeRGB1998 is just well, ridiculous.  NONE does indeed take control, Just another case of HP confusing what is always understood by many and using their own definitions.  It really was annoying.  Affinity, my apologies for having even considered putting you in the dock.

• None: No color theme is used.
• Default/sRGB: This theme sets the product to print RGB data in raw device mode. When using this theme, manage color in the software program or in the operating system for correct rendering.
• Vivid/sRGB: The product increases the color saturation in the midtones. Use this theme when printing business graphics.
• Photo (sRGB): The product interprets RGB color as if it were printed as a photograph using a digital mini lab. The product renders deeper, more saturated colors differently than with the Default (sRBG) theme. Use this theme when printing photos.
• Photo (Adobe RGB 1998): Use this theme with printing digital photos that use the AdobeRGB color space rather than sRGB. Turn off color management in the software program when using this theme.