Colorsync can't repair bad printer profiles

Reinstall the HP Update 2.8. All mine, w/PhotoSmart C4680 pass.

Ah! The proverbial missing information. Did you remove the bad profiles before installing? If so, then may require reinstalling the original HP software, followed by the 2.8 update. Also, check /Library/Printers/hp/Profiles/.

This is way beyond my ken. All I can suggest is try http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/siteHome?cc=us&lc=en and also file a bug report w/Apple via http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

It is unusual that ColorSync it is not able to repair the HP profiles. But then I don't think that the color information in profile has a problem. Looking at the message you have for the Advanced Glossy profile, the two entries that are mentioned is the descriptor (desc) for the profile, which is just its name, and the device model description string (dmdd), which again is just a text based entry.

You can actually check this profile in ColorSync by selecting the Profiles tab and then most likely Other. Here you should see the HP entry for your B8800 and under this heading will be all the supporting profiles. If you select the Advanced Glossy profile, the right pane will show its colour map. Above this map will be information about the profile and if you press the Open button, a pane will appear showing you the 'desc' and 'dmdd' tags. If you can select either of these and read the supporting text then I don't think your issue is the profile and just something that ColorSync has a grievance with.

The next test you can do is open the image you want to print on glossy paper using ColorSync. So, File > Open and select the image. Then you can press File > Print. From the print dialog with the HP selected, via the ColorSync Utilty menu in the print dialog, set the Color setting to "Prematch to printer profile" and the Intent as Perceptual for a photo. Before you press Print, change to the HP menu where you would select the Advanced Glossy paper and then print. If this still has the wrong output then you can try again, this time selecting "Hand off to printer" for the Color setting under the ColorSync Utility print menu.

With the "Hand off to Printer" setting giving the same result it would suggest the issue is related to the printer. Do you get this orange tone when you print on plain paper, or is this something you only previously saw when printing on glossy stock? Just wondering if we are blaming the profile when it is the printer at fault.

If the orange tone is present for plain paper then it would suggest it is not the printer but the profile. Given that your previous actions of removing the HP files from the Mac and reinstalling, only to end up with the same result, then it would suggest there is an issue with the driver and supporting files. This would then be up to HP to resolve, assuming that it is not just something that is happening on your Mac.

Just with the ColorSync utility, there is an ability to apply the printer profile to the view for the opened image. If you open an image in ColorSync, on the bottom of the image border you will see a drop menu between "Match to Profile" and the Intent menu; could be showing None as a default. If you open this and then select Output and then select the HP Glossy profile, this will give a representation of the output. Does this show a lack of orange tone?

Thanks for the images Aaron. Pictures do tell a thousand words...

How many inks does this model have? A number of new inkjets have photo cyan and photo magenta and even red and green, on top of the standard cyan, mageneta, yellow and black. These photo inks only get used when certain paper stocks are used, such as glossy photo papers.

Looking at the lack of colour in the pumpkin and skin tones, it would suggest that these enhancement colours are not being used. That's assuming the printer has these additional inks. If it just has the standard CMYK then it seems to have the mix wrong of yellow and magenta and this would be related to the settings for the selected media.

And the other thing that looks wrong is the vividness of the image. Even allowing for a RGB additive source (the display) vs the CMYK subtractive source (the printer), the picture appears dull. Again, this could be a result of misfiring inks or a profile telling the printer to do the wrong thing.

If you can print this image fine using plain paper then it does point at the paper profile and the conversion from RGB to CMYK (because ColorSync is showing that the RGB interpretation of the profile is fine). So I think you need to check with HP or their forums to see if there is something they can suggest. Additional testing on your behalf could be trying another OS to see what result you get using the gloss paper profile. And possibly an older version of OS X, such as Snow Leopard, to see if it is a Lion/driver issue.

I am running Lion 10.7.3 on a mid-2011 Macbook Air. I get the same kinds of errors in Colorsync Utility, which it also cannot repair. My HP C3180 color quality is also particularly bad with orange tones. I printed out a pdf brochure I downloaded today with autumn leaves - no oranges, and one leaf that was unabashedly yellow in the original, not orange at all, came out a bright red.

I am using plain paper. It just has a black and a tricolor cartridge. One can calibrate the photo cartridge, which I don't use, but not the regular tricolor cartridge. I also had this problem with Snow Leopard, but I think it is worse now. When I first got this printer in 2006 the color was excellent but at a certain point the color just started being off. It's not just age - I had an older HP that still had very good color matching as of last year, but it's not compatible with Lion.

I don't know if this is relevant, but I also have display calibrations that I had created that show similar errors which can't be repaired. As far as uninstalling and reinstalling drivers goes, when I looked on the HP support site, it said that updated drivers in Lion are part of Apple updates - you can't download and reinstall a driver from HP anymore.

If you find any clues on this, I'd be interested.

This is an old thread but the same problem - possibly the same solution would work:

Kenneth Hjulstrom

Hi,

I had similar problems with some of my profiles, and I was able to fix all of them. Here's what I did (if I remember correctly):

First, make a note of the location of the problem profiles. The path names are shown in the error messages from the Color Sync repair process, as you have shown.

Second, copy each of these problem profiles to some other location as a backup. You will be modifying them, so the backups will come in handy if you break something.

Third, locate each problem profile in the Finder and double-click it. It should open in the Color Sync Utility. In the topmost pane of the Color Sync Utility, you will see a list of tags along with associated properties "Data", "Size", and "Description". It seems that in all of your cases, the problem is that the tag size of one of the tags is incorrect. If I remember correctly, all I did was find the tag in question and delete the existing "Size" value for that tag, and close the window (I may have been prompted to save my changes, I don't recall. After that, I ran the repair process again, and the problem was fixed! It's possible that I wasn't able to simply change the size, and that I had to delete the tag in question and re-add it (make sure to write down the "Data" and "Description" values before you delete so you know what to enter when you recreate the tag). But I had about 11 or so "broken" profiles, and this enabled me to fix them all. Another thing I noticed is that subsequent runs of the repair process sometimes fix things that the first repair process couldn't fix. But eventually, I go to a point where subsequent repairs didn't accomplish anything, so I ended up doing what I described above to get all of my profiles fixed.

Hope this helps.

Ken

12 G4 PowerBook, Mac OS X (10.5.3), 1.125 Gb RAM