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By Tom Hauenstein
With the recent release of Photoshop CS4 there have been some changes in the appearance of the File–Print window, as well as some changes in how Photoshop communicates with the printer driver. Here, we’ll cover all the changes associated with CS4 and everything you need to know when it comes to printing with it.
The New Originals
When you compare the print dialog boxes between CS3 and CS4 (see Figure 1 and Figure 2) you’ll notice a bunch of changes. It’s okay though, because most of it is just a rearranging of already existing buttons. For example, the landscape and portrait rotation moved from under the Preview to next to the Page Setup button. Also, the Units option moved out of the scaling box to below the scaling box. Finally, the Match Print Colors moved under the Preview, where the orientation options used to be. These are not big moves and should not affect you much.
Figure 1: The Print dialog box in CS3. Click on the image for a larger version.
Figure 2: The Print dialog box in CS4. Click on the image for a larger version.
However, you may have noticed two additional check boxes below the Preview and they are Gamut Warning and Show Paper White. Match Print Colors, Gamut Warning, and Show Paper White all deal with changing the appearance of the preview to match the print you will get from your printer. None of these boxes, whether checked or unchecked, will affect the appearance of your print. They only affect the preview located above the preview. That’s a lot of previews, and we’re just beginning! Yee haw!
First, you should realize that the only way you can utilize these check boxes is if your Color Handling is set to Photoshop Manages Colors. And, the only way they will work accurately is if you have a solid ICC profile for your paper in the Printer Profile drop-down menu. This is the preferred method of color management anyway, and if you have more questions about printing through the Epson driver for accurate color please click here. If Color Handling is set to Printer Manages Color then these check boxes will be grayed out.
Match Print Colors is simply an on/off button for turning the preview into a proof. With this checked the preview will be changed to reflect the color gamut of that particular ICC profile. If it’s not checked then you will see the image in the RGB world as it was originally shot, if you have a quality monitor that is properly calibrated and profiled. If you don’t then there’s no point in using the Match Print Colors check box because an inaccurate monitor will not allow this function to proof properly.
Gamut Warning highlights parts of the image that are out of gamut. The Print dialog box uses a silver highlight color to point this out, which is helpful since it pinpoints which colors the printer can and cannot print (see Figure 3 and Figure 4).
Figure 3: This image has an intense blue and an intense red that is out of the paper’s gamut, but without Gamut Warning on, you would not know until you hit print. Ouch. Click on the image for a larger version.
Figure 4: This is the same image but with Gamut Warning on. Notice that it turned the bright red and bright blue to a silver, indicating that these colors are out of the paper’s gamut. Click on the image for a larger version.
Show Paper White changes the white point of the image to the white point of the paper. It is especially useful in setting expectations when printing to a colored stock like a yellowish newspaper stock. The only problem with this is that it seems to put a haze over the whole image, making it appear flatter and more washed out than it actually prints. Since I usually print on stocks that are close to pure white, I don’t use this feature very often.
All of these features are found in the Softproofing Setup, and this is where they should be used. For more on softproofing in Photoshop, click here. If you use softproofing, then you can adjust the image for the differences created by each paper and its respective color gamut. If you use these proofing features in the File-Print menu, you can see how the paper will affect the image, but it is too late in the workflow to do anything about it.
Cups and Cakes
There is a nice safety feature added to CS4 that makes it almost impossible to color correct a file twice. Double color correction occurs when both the driver and Photoshop are set up to manage color correction. When an image is double color corrected, the results are far from good… a.k.a., bad.
In CS3, Adobe added notes under the Color Handling dropdown to help avoid this horrible effect. So, in CS3, if you select Photoshop Manages Colors, a note pops up: “Remember to disable color management in the printer dialog box.” In CS4, Adobe took it one step forward. Now when you select Photoshop Manages Color, Photoshop will automatically go into your printer driver settings and disable color management. This is fantastic. Try it out.