On Mar 11, 2011, at 4:44 AM, Jared Earle wrote:
> Are we back to how MacOSX is NRFPT and that Colorsync is broken yet? No I was not going to go there, but since you asked: It is ready for prime time, ColorSync itself is not broken. But there are still persistent problems printing from apps like Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, that do not occur on Windows. And the primary cause of this is not a technological flaw, but an ideological debate where Apple believes in system level opt-out color management (i.e. it happens unless the app explicitly asks for it not to happen), where as on Windows it is an out-in system, where the application must ask for color management to happen. The problem is that professional applications prematch, do not need system level color management, which will conflict. And Apple does not provide a publicly documented method for disabling ColorSync in the printing pipeline. And the private SPI for doing so has numerous dependencies, complexities, and is fragile resulting in frequent "it works" and "it doesn't work" from version to version of both OS, application and print driver. In seven years since complaining about this architecture, we've had over a dozen of these instances. And zero such instances on Windows. And also, seven years ago, my co-author Bruce Fraser proposed professionals who care about color may be better off moving to a friendlier platform for printing, as a result of this architecture. If he were alive today, I think two years ago he would have publicly proposed that very thing, as that's when the problem became much worse than it ever had been in the past. Printing simply was not repeatable, or consistent at all, in a prematching workflow context. So presently, it is cautiously workable, but there are some unknowns still about how to print profile targets reliably. The fact we get different results between different versions of Photoshop, but only on Mac OS. A completely mentally absent driver situation with Epson, which while better, still punishes the user unnecessarily with its installers. A colleague of mine first proposed he would no longer actively support, but would actively discourage, using consulting services to troubleshoot and fix problems related to printing on Mac OS X with its printing pipeline. (And by this I do not mean to implicate CUPS, this is not a CUPS problem at all.) Instead he recommends "get a RIP, or use Windows" preferring to use a RIP on Mac OS to get around the entire Photoshop->OS->Epson print path (although in Epson's defense, Canon and HP have all had variable problems with their drivers and color on Mac OS as well). And I've been brought along and recommend the same, reluctantly, because this sh*t should work. There's no good reason why it shouldn't work and work consistently. But again, it is an ideological barrier, not a technological one. And what makes it so ridiculous is that ColorSync isn't even used by default. Overwhelmingly, proprietary driver/printer color management is used by default. The next instance of color management is at the application level which is what pros depend on. And the next instance after that is using a RIP. And then after that is intentionally using ColorSync in the print pipeline - it is such a minority position as to be essentially irrelevant. Anyway, the end result is that things are not better than they were 7 years ago. And they are distinctly, demonstrably worse (by being inconsistent) than Windows. It's unfortunate. Chris Murphy_______________________________________________ MacOSX-admin mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-admin
