Adobe Color Printer Utility

For reasons known only to themselves in the last release of Photoshop with Creative Suite 5 Adobe omitted the setting in Print dialogue that let users output profiling charts and other images with the Colour Handling set to No Colour Management.

A number of work arounds were developed to enable profiling charts to be output without any colour management but none were entirely satisfactory.

Now, at last, Adobe have come up with a solution and have released an application specifically for printing profiling charts. The Adobe Colour Printer Utility can be downloaded for free from:

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/834/cpsid_83497.html

You simply have to launch the application, load the TIFF file of the colour patches, select the correct page set up and then print. Of course you still need to set you printer driver options correctly to also do no colour adjustments and to use the right media settings etc.

Writing

I've always enjoyed writing, I'm currently on my third novel, and this week I've been busy at the keyboard rather than the spectrophotometer. I'm currently writing the third edition of Practical Colour Management and we hope to release it sometime next month.




We've been amazed at how many people have downloaded the second edition from all around the world and it's been a challenge to put enough new stuff in the third edition to make it worth people downloading or buying the new version. So far I've updated the Photoshop chapter to reflect the changes in CS5, heavily revised monitor calibration and completely rewritten the digital photography chapter. I've also added an appendix on understanding monitor specifications. If anybody has any other recommendations for changes or revisions then please email them to info@nativedigital.co.uk or comment on this blog.

I'm also writing the third article in a series for the Royal Photographic Society Journal. I've covered monitor calibration and RAW processing in the previous articles and this time I'm trying to give some guidance to help readers get better results when supplying images to photo labs and photo book printers. I've sent test images to a selection of labs and websites such as Blurb and so far I'm very satisfied with most of the results I've got back. Again if you have some good or bad experiences of sending images to others to print I'd love to hear them.

You can download 'Practical Colour Management' (or buy the book) at the Native Digital website.