Disabling color management in LR

[Ed_Hodney0633]

Do I need to disable color management in LR when printing with custom ICC?

[Per Berntsen]

There is no way to disable color management, and no need to disable it.

Colors will be converted from the document profile to the printer profile of your choice, and this is handled by color management.

However, if you choose Managed by printer under Profile, the image will be sent to the printer with no conversion.

[Conrad_C]

The short answer is yes, but it’s best to talk about it more precisely.

Per Bentsen is right in that Lightroom Classic (the application) always uses color management. This is true of just about any modern photo application.

When printing, now we’re specifically talking about how colors are converted for the printer. Here, it’s a question of properly coordinating the application color (Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, etc.) with printer color (Epson, Canon, etc.).

The picture below spells it out: The important thing is that if you enable color management on either side, you disable it on the other side to avoid double color management. If you select a custom printer profile in Lightroom Classic, then yes you disable color management but not in Lightroom Classic like you asked, instead you disable color managment in the printer driver settings.

Fortunately, this is becoming more automatic; you see in my picture that if I choose a custom print profile in Lightroom Classic it tells the Epson print driver about that, so the Epson printer driver automatically disables color management and makes it unselectable so I can’t mistakenly enable it. This doesn’t happen with all application/printer driver combinations, but it looks like Adobe, Apple, and Epson have coordinated their code a little more here.