🚀 go-pugleaf

Well... there's good and bad news based on some quick informal testing.

The bad first: this doesn't really work as well as I had hoped. Testing on my WinXP/Epson 1270 setup, I found my "PDF proof" output to be uniformly darker than my PressReady output when I used the Epson's native ICM printer color management. Colors were more saturated, but they were quite accurate (no noticeable shift or cast). The output, consequently, was pleasing in appearance, but a proof it was not.

Switching ICM off in the Epson driver and moving to individual output profiles for various media, I got mixed results -- some better than others, but none close enough to the PressReady output to declare a winner.

But that brings me to the good news: When you print your CMYK file out of Acrobat 6 using your printer's native (RGB) driver, the choices you make in the printer profile dropdown do make a difference. That means you can use the press defaults in Distiller (leave color unchanged, default intent) -- which I found to be the best choice -- and still dial in various RGB printer profiles at print time in Acrobat 6 and have that make meaningful differences. Rasterizing everything and converting to an RGB space in Photoshop was the only way to do that in the past.

I could, for example, take one of my output profiles that got me close and tweak it with something like Colorvision's Doctor Pro.

Acrobat 6 is promising. For example, it has a proofing check box in the advanced print dialog that is supposed to apply the choices you make in a separate proof setup dialog (such as U.S SWOP coated output profile). For the moment, however, those features, although seemingly available even when printing with the native driver, appear to be meaningful only when printing to Postscript devices, such as a PressReady printer... which puts us back at square one.

Oh, well.

=-= Harron =-=

(Correction - I meant to write "Acrobat" rather than "Distiller" in the second paragraph of post #1.)