Print driver settings from CS6 to CC

[Das Boomer]

Greetings,

It appears (or so I'm told and I'm in the process of starting to investigate all this from a user), that CS6, using print driver defaults, used to print CMYK more vividly than CC. Currently, users who have upgraded to CC are resorting to printing using 'Composite RGB' from their windows print driver in order to provide an overall more saturated, 'brighter' output for their documents made up of both jpegs and CYMK elements (solid rectangles & the likes). They find the normal print driver output, Composite CMYK, to be too dull when using CC vs CS6.

They are printing on a Fiery digital press. I understand that a Fiery would treat sRGB to a more saturated output than CMYK which gets casted to GRACoL 2013 (EFI). This is usually the intent and expectation for both colour spaces.

I thought of setting the default CMYK source colour space in the Fiery to XCMYK to oversaturate a little and attempt to produce the saturated output they were getting in CS6 but I feel this is, in essence, grotesque and would clownify the output. Half hazardly, I feel rather than see clearly that this is not the solution and should be avoided. I feel I'm missing pieces of the puzzle here.

I need someone to unpack a little the history and illustrate a little the 'why' and hopefully the 'how' I can get my users back on track. Why are the default print driver settings in CS6 produces for both CMYK and RGB elements a more saturated output than the latest and greatest CC version?

Thank you kindly,

Antoine

[Mike Witherell · Accepted solution]

Not sure I can provide any precision here, but for years and years we have been recommending to first export to a color-managed PDF and then print from the PDF. 

In terms of color managment, I have been coordinating the same color management starting in Photoshop and then letting Bridge tell Illustrator and InDesign and Acrobat to follow in the same Colors Settings File. Another thing I have been practicing is to work entirely RGB from Photoshop to InDesign (Edit > Transparency Blend Space > RGB) and then export to either RGB or CMYK PDF according to the needs of the particular file/project.