Barney wrote:
Using the same color profile on InDesign as in Photoshop (in CS3, on a Mac) results in different outputs. It seems that to get good matches, you have to create new InDesign-specific profiles.
This one was really baffling, especially because after doing some research we found that it actually works fine when printing from CS2, and even in CS3 for Windows. However, there does appear to be a problem with printing from InDesign CS3 to non-PostScript printers (such as inkjets) on the Mac. This is a significant problem for people using inkjet printers for proofing, and especially for photographers, who often use inkjets for their final output.
Lucky for us, color management expert Chris Murphy (co-author of Real World Color Management and the video author of the color management title at lynda.com) came up with an answer:
Regarding printing from InDesign to RGB output devices (this includes essentially all inkjet printers from every manufacturer, when driven by the manufacturer print driver… inkjet printers driven by a PostScript RIP are considered CMYK output devices, and thus this post does not apply to them):
When printing to RGB output devices from InDesign using the same ICC profiles and settings as in Photoshop, you still get crummy results, in terms of color, that differ from both IDCS2 and other Adobe applications including Photoshop CS3.
InDesign CS2 previously did all rasterizing and color space conversion in InDesign prior to submitting the print job to the OS. In CS3 this was changed to submit PostScript + colorspace information, which is then supposed to be normalized by the OS. Except that it doesn’t work. Mac OS X drops the color space information.
The workaround is to enable “Print as Bitmap” in the Advanced pane of the Print dialog in InDesign. This causes IDCS3 to do the conversion and generate a bitmap prior to submitting to the OS (the default behavior with IDCS2), rather than depending on the OS to do color conversion or rasterizing. Thus you can use the same ICC profiles and print driver settings as with all other Adobe applications if you choose this option.
This was a revelation to me. I knew that Print as Bitmap was added in CS3, but I didn’t really consider how significant it could be to the printing process. Again, the Print as Bitmap checkbox is only relevant when printing to non-PostScript devices (such as inkjets).
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on May 20, 2008
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