How can I control colour output on a printer?

Hope I haven't lost you yet.

Here's why profiling your monitor correctly is a must if you're going to get anywhere. Any function or software that claims to create a monitor profile by doing nothing but eyeballing it is useless. Period. At no point does the computer know what you're looking at, or have any idea what color your monitor is producing.

Using Apple's Calibrate function as an example, it assumes when you start a new profile creation that your monitor is showing a perfect 6500K color balance, a perfect predetermined luminance, and a perfect 6500K black and white point. You can probably guess how well that works.

All monitors drift. The profile your computer or standalone monitor came with is good for maybe three months from new. And even on day one it isn't very accurate. LCD and LED monitors almost always drift pink as they age. When you try to adjust that back to gray in Calibrate, you have to push green (reduce magenta) to get back to a visual gray. Except, Calibrate can't see what you're looking at or why you're doing that. As far as it's concerned, you like a greenish gray, and that's what your prints will look like. Not too badly at first, but the older the monitor gets, and the more you have to push green to offset the pink cast, the more obvious the green in your prints will be.

With a colorimeter, you produce a calibration and profile that is based on a device that is actually measuring what your monitor is doing. There's no guessing involved. The result is a profile that accurately describes your monitor's color response to ColorSync.

Settings in the colorimeter's software.

1. Up to you if you want the calibration step to use a 2.2 gamma (the darkest point where human eye can still distinguish between near shades of black), or 1.8, which is what the printing industry uses since that's generally the darkest black you can put on paper without soaking it with ink.
2. Use D50. Not the completely awful "default" of 6500K. Nothing in the real world looks that blue in daylight. D50 is based on the color we see with a midday sun. About 5000K for white and black, and about a 5200 gray balance in between. Seriously. No one should be using 6500K. Ever.

Yes, you will perceive you monitor as looking yellowish at first, but only because you're used to looking at it so insanely blue. Give your brain a few days to get used to looking at an actual gray instead of blue.

The printer is the hard part. It has no color management controls. With a real monitor profile, output should be much closer already. But you'll have to play with the driver's simple controls of contrast and color to fine tune it.

I'll try not to get too deep here, but you have to go at least a bit on the eye glazing side to explain color management.

The way computers understand color (a concept they can neither see or actually "understand") is with a mathematical model that makes visual sense to us. The current model is CIE Lab. It represents the entire range of color human eyes can see. In other words, it's not a profile, but rather the master color palette everything else under it is based on. The L stands for Lightness (brightest point down to full black). a and b are just arbitrary letters for the underlying color. If you turn off the a b channels, your image simply looks like a B&W picture.

So, what's Lab for? It's so computers know how RGB profiles fit into it. A profile, as simply put as possible, is a mathematical model of how much of Lab your device can emit (monitor, projector), capture (scanner, digital camera), or output (printer).

Lab is generally displayed as a sphere. I mocked up this particular one for a seminar.

Straight down the center from top to bottom is fully desaturated color. In other words, gray. Up to full white, down to full black, and outwards from pure gray to maximum color saturation. Follow any 3D point within the sphere for all other possible hues in between.

How does that apply to RGB profiles? Since a profile is a section of Lab, it would kind of look something like this.

Not really how such a slab of RGB would fit in a Lab sphere, but you get the idea. Since all color devices have their own Lab response of gamut and range, they'll also have their own RGB field. Like Adobe RGB vs sRGB. The smaller space is sRGB. You can see how much more of Lab Adobe RGB can represent.

There is only one true solution.

You first create a real monitor profile using a hardware/software solution, such as with X-Rite's Calibrate series of monitor profile packages. Don't bother with the built-in calibrate function in the System Preferences. It's a waste of time. Use D50 as the color balance with the hardware calibrator. NOT 6500.

After that, you need the correct printer profiles for the paper you're using. For the case of your Canon printer, download whatever profiles they offer for your specific model. Profiles for other models will do you no good. And on top of that, if you choose the printer's profile for matte paper, they mean Canon's matte paper.

Printer profiles are highly specific to the printer and paper used to create it. You can take three types of matte paper from three different manufacturers that all look and feel the same, but they will not produce the same color when you use the same print settings.

it appears it's a file containing details of printer and paper characteristics which acts somehow as a bridge between the image source (like say a RAW or JPG file) and the printer.

Sort of. File type (RAW, JPG, TIFF, etc.) is irrelevant. What matters is if the image file has a profile tagged to it that means anything.

which goes on to suggest that while you can use a Mac to do more colour-accurate printing, you should be using a professional standard printer, and very specific paper.

Odd they would single the Mac platform out. Using Windows, Linux or any other possible OS have the exact same requirements.

I think that neither Apple nor Canon want to give me just a bit more control in the chain from the picture to the print.

I have no issue getting exact (within reason) color matching from my screen to print. I also have the necessary hardware and software to make that happen.

Apple is not going to give anyone that level of control because that would require – at minimum – including a colorimeter with every computer so every use could create a genuinely useful monitor profile. Problem is it would add cost to every Mac; most people wouldn't know what it was for (and likely throw it away); and even if they did, you need to know at least something about color management to use it correctly.

Canon is not helping you with your printer because, and sorry to be blunt, it's a very cheap model. They don't even offer pre-made profiles to download for your device.

If there's any across-the-board reality with printers, it's this. The less they cost, the more difficult to nearly impossible they become to profile. The problem with inexpensive printers is the simple fact they're aimed at the consumer who know little to nothing about color matching/color management. Because of that (and here's the main point), they are so severely set up for "automatic color", you literally can't profile them. Not even if the drivers have an option to disable color management. The printer itself still tries to apply auto adjustments. And you can't profile a device that will not print the profiling targets in a raw, uncontrolled state.

We just closed down our small business. For our client color proofs, we used an Epson Stylus Pro 4900. Not at all cheap, but could be profiled down to the last ounce of monitor-to-print color matching, and used with a RIP to match color to the CMYK output of a professional printing press.

Compare that to what is now our only printer – a Xerox VersaLink C405. A roughly $980 device. And has the price on those ever gone up! We bought ours just a year ago for $500. Sheesh! Anyway, even at that price, you have to work at it a bit to get good profiles. If I really needed better and more accurate control, I'd have to spring for the C505, which are now about $2,100. I could have gotten one of those just a year ago for $1,200.

But enough of that. I'll focus on what matters more to you next post (or two). Have to spread things out to stay under the character limit.

Living Fossil wrote:

I'm using AirPrint, since my printer is somewhat distant from my computer. Would it help if I used a USB connection?

Try connecting via USB and use the printer's driver instead of Airprint. There's no guarantee that Airprint supports all the features of the actual Canon drivers; it was designed for basic consumer color printing, not for custom color management.

Also, printers with basic tricolor cartridges like the TS5300 series have very limited, if any, color management capability due to the fact there are only three basic inks to work with (R,G,B) and they are, well, consumer printers. My former, basic printers that used tricolor cartridges, made acceptable color prints but only on papers from the printer manufacturer; and there wasn't much I could do in Photoshop or other apps to control how the final print would actually look. My present Epson XP-15000 uses 6 discrete inks and I can also apply icc color profiles matched to the papers I use; the results are nothing short of spectacular.

You didn't say exactly what model printer you have, but I found this with a simple google search: TS5300 series Setup package (Mac) for macOS Catalina 10.15, macOS Mojave 10.14, macOS High Sierra 10.13, macOS Sierra v10.12, OS X El Capitan v10.11.6

Suggest you look into whether or not it's suitable for your model.

If you printing from Photos you could use the edit feature to lighten (or other touchups) the photo before printing.