Managing color to Canon Pixma Pro 100

10/6/2019 UPDATE: THIS POST IS INCORRECT. SEE MY LATER POST (on 10/6/2019) FOR CORRECT INFO BASED ON MUCH MORE EXTENSIVE TESTING. 

Lou

I finally figured out how to set up the Canon driver for the Pixma Pro 100 to print from Indesign. Being used to Epson drivers, I found the Canon driver unclear and confusing. As always, the quality and accuracy will depend on the accuracy of the profile used.

InDesign always manages color on output because it is possible for an InDesign document to have multiple placed images in different color spaces. All elements created inside InDesign will use the document default color space as the source profile. Every place image with an embedded ICC profile will its embedded profile as the source profile. Here’s the image I created in InDesign and used to test printer output. 

Below is the InDesign Color Management pane from InDesign’s Print window. The document color space is Adobe RGB. As you can see above, I used the same image, but each one has a different embedded ICC profile (sRGB, Adobe RGB and ProPhoto RGB). The Printer profile is RR Polar Matte CanPro-100 (profile downloaded from Red River Paper for the Canon Pixma Pro-100 printer. It’s not perfectly accurate, but it is pretty close for this printer/paper/ink. InDesign will convert from all the various source profiles to a single output space, in this case RR Polar Matte CanPro-100. 

Now, the Canon Driver. First, you must select the appropriate media from the “Quality & Media” pane in the Canon driver. I’m printing on Matte Photo Paper and this was the media setting chosen when this profile was created by Red River Paper. I chose High Quality.

Below is the critical and final driver setting. From the “Color Matching” pane of the Canon Driver, you need to select Colorsync, then Automatic (Mac O/S). Since we selected Matte Photo Paper in the media pane, choosing Automatic displays this setting below the word Automatic. This was very confusing and not at all transparent to me. It seemed to me that double color management might be taking place, once in Indesign and once in the Canon driver. I’m used to Epson Drivers, which have a No Color Adjustment setting. This apparently is Canon’s confusing way of saying the same thing. Not clear, and the manual is also unclear. But, it printed properly…finally. Just wanted to pass the solution along. 

Thanks, Rob. Agreed, sRGB is a small space. Just using that as an example to help clarify. If I set InDesign's output space to be the same as the document space, then ALL images (regardless of their embedded profiles) will be converted to the output profile, right? 

I’m going to stop using the direct reply—it’s a mess.

I think the InDesign Color Mangement>Printer Profile choice acts as the source space for the page color, the actual destination output profile has to be chosen in the printer software, which would normally be a media profile.

An analogy would be exporting an ID spread containing page items with different color spaces, to a single color space PDF. If the destination is a large RGB space the color appearance would not change on the export. Similarly the printer would take the incoming composite RGB source and convert it for output using the media profile.

In this case the three color spaces in the ID page get exported as a single composite RGB space with the same color appearance.

Do I need to let ID manage colors and then select sRGB or Adobe RGB as the output to the Canon driver? I assume if I do so, this will convert everything in my ID file to sRGB or Adobe RGB.

Troubleshooting print color for others is difficult because there are so many print driver variables.

InDesign is different than PS because there can be any number of objects with different color spaces on the page (multiple source color spaces), while Photoshop docs always are limited to a single color space.

So yes, for the Printer Profile I would choose Document RGB (you don‘t have to actually convert the page items), which will send all the color to the printer in the document’s assigned RGB profile—document RGB becomes the uniform source color. I think Printer Profile in the Color Management tab is a bit misleading because the Output Color is Composite RGB, so Printer Profile is really the uniform source color space that will be sent to the print driver.

Then you would choose the print driver’s output profile from the driver settings (the Printer... button in OSX). Here I'm showing an Epson native driver’s Print Settings where I’ve chosen the output profile from the Media Type drop down—in this case the Media Type list is actually a list of RGB output profiles.

RGB driven printers never output the actual document color values, there's always a color managed conversion from the source to the driver’s printer profile. I’ve defined the source as document RGB, so a document CMYK value would get converted to documentRGB and then to the chosen output profile in the print driver.

The Epson driver’s Media Type is also a bit misleading—the choices are actually output .icc profiles. Here’s the Photo Glossy Paper RGB outptut class profile displayed in Apple’s Colorsync Utility: