Print with Preview Dialogue Window Settings
Print with Preview Dialogue Window Settings
Use the print with preview command to access all the color conversion options with ultimate control inside Photoshop.
Once in the Print Preview window the first thing to do is to click on the Page Setup… button to adjust the page size and orientation for the preview pane sizing. You should always choose your printer here too as the paper size selections are linked to the printer selected.
Make sure you have Show more options checked to find your color managements options. If the roll down "Output" is selected change it to Color Management.
You will notice that the document profile assumed or embedded is shown as the Source Space. You can make a faux proof here by clicking the radio button Proof: Proof Setup. What this does is take into account the soft proof that we had set up earlier. If you hadn't changed the proof set up then the default working space separation profile would be the assumed destination. If your settings were Europe Prepress then this would be Euroscale Coated V2 which is a press CMYK space. What route it takes is the document space (the embedded or assumed/assigned profile) converts to the proofing space , then converts to the Print Space profile or stream. The Print Space is your printer profile or instructions to embed the document profile in the data going to the printer driver.
The Print Space profile selection is by far the most important user selection for high quality printing achieving your goals in printing.
There are at least three distinct ways to manage your color here. For users that have and want a simplified workflow you'll want to let your driver control the colors through sRGB a nice easy color management called ColorSmart. What you do is set the Print space to sRGB and let the driver selection ColorSmart do all the color management. Usually this is all that is needed for consumer level printing, or when printing client orders of prints from digital cameras. It's a nice option for efficient workflow for these types of images.
The other two options for a higher degree of flexibility are to either control all the color conversions in Photoshop or to select an option to embed the document profile (and the proofing space*) that the driver can process within the framework of ICC Color Management.
The Rendering Intent is a personal choice. Since the HP DJ 30/130 print so well with a huge dynamic range relative often prints very accurately in most image ranges.
If you have highly colored images perceptual may be better. Perceptual maps the colors to a pleasing smooth giving up accuracy for homogeneity and overall smooth graduations. Relative prints accurate colors within the range of the printer and media yet when the colors are near or at the boundaries they just are placed at the same point and thus print to the same nearest value creating flat similar colored areas if the gamut is exceeded.
Since you can preview the differences in Proof Setup you can preview both rendering intents before printing.
Some of the other features useful to the HP printers are the size and position of the image relative to the page that was selected in Page Setup…
You can uncheck the centre image check box and position the page anywhere within the zone of the preview pane. You can fill the page in the driver with the fit to page check box yet the quality of the interpolation is far better in Photoshop before the print driver.
Click print to go to the HP driver dialogue box.