Lightroom 2015.6 Prints Dark And Wrong Colours

[DibbyDoo]

Hi i have been using Lightroom 6.5.1 for all my prints and prints fantastic i have the epson ET-2550 printer. i decided to do the update to the latest version 2 days ago to lightroom 2015.6 and now all my prints turn out dark and the wrong colours i tried reseting lightroom and installing and reinstalling everything and it still does the same and when ever i cool back to LR 6.5.1 or 5.7.1 the prints come out fine and looking very good can any one shine a light on what the problem is becsaue i can't afford to keep wasting good paper i will attach a picture of a printed picture of it printing good and the print that looks bad on the same piece of paper thank you so much

[carl37]

LR 2015.5 is OK.  It is LR 2015.6 that has the CM printing bug.

[TheDigitalDog]

carl37 wrote:

LR 2015.5 is OK. It is LR 2015.6 that has the CM printing bug.

LR CC 2015.6. yes, PS 2015.5 as well. Both released this month (and why one is .5 and one .6, I can't fathom).

[Michael Lenticular]

The different isn't huge, but since I make editioned prints, I want them to be the same as what I've printed in the past. For now, I'm printing with last year's CS version, in the hope that Adobe corrects this. I don't want to have to tweak and remaster all my print files. I find the primary differences to be a hue shift in blue and green, and a deepening of the darker portions of the tone scale. I don't have a densitometer, but it looking at the tone scale on your test target, all the values are darker when printed with the new version of the software. It would be interesting if you can measure those gray patches on your chart comparing the old software with the new.

[simonsaith]

It is good to confirm that LR CC 2015.6 and PS 2015.5 print outs are the same.

The reason for the difference is probably at the Mac OS X API level. Both LR CC 2015.6 and PS 2015.5 have upgraded to build with the latest Xcode 7 compiler. As a result, it no longer supports some of the legacy print and CM APIs that both programs relied on in the past. The LR CC 2015.6 and PS 2015.5 new implementation are based on the latest platform APIs supported by the Mac OS X. There are most likely some print behavior changes between the old and the new. I guess it is just part of life for moving forward .

[carl37]

So what is your solution to this CM mess that was created in the latest update to LR?  To me LR 2015.6 is now simply not suitable for color managed printing and I have to export my files to print from other apps.

[TheDigitalDog]

simonsaith wrote:

It is good to confirm that LR CC 2015.6 and PS 2015.5 print outs are the same.

The reason for the difference is probably at the Mac OS X API level. Both LR CC 2015.6 and PS 2015.5 have upgraded to build with the latest Xcode 7 compiler. As a result, it no longer supports some of the legacy print and CM APIs that both programs relied on in the past. The LR CC 2015.6 and PS 2015.5 new implementation are based on the latest platform APIs supported by the Mac OS X. There are most likely some print behavior changes between the old and the new. I guess it is just part of life for moving forward .

Ah, something isn't right there. CS6 is fine and so if there's some new OS X differences, why isn't it affected? Now maybe this is an Apple bug (we've seen this years past where Adobe, Apple and Epson all caused many such issues). Now non Epson print users are affected. So someone at Adobe and Apple need to talk.

I'll report what I find after measuring targets out of LR, Photoshop CC and Photoshop CS6. Maybe I should try Apple's software too (like Preview).

[Was DYP]

For me to a Canon iPF8400, LR 2015.5.1 prints correct using Apple's pipeline and LR 2015.6 does not. I see a difference between the two versions and the difference is huge.

As I mentioned previously LR 2015.6 prints correct using Canon's Fast Graphic Process pipeline.

[Daniel Sofer]

Canon iPF 6450, Calibrated monitor, Custom Hahnemühle paper profiles by Paul Dupont. Works great with the previous Lightroom.

With 2015.6, prints dark and the color is off. Like it's double color correcting maybe?

Same photo, export from LR 2015.6 to Photoshop, print from Photoshop using Canon's Photoshop plugin -- Looks perfect.

Thanks LR folks for fixing the problem with my old Fuji XE-2 images.

-- Daniel Sofer,

President LADIG, Los Angeles Lightroom User Group

http://ladig.org

http://hermosawave.photography

[TheDigitalDog]

I just got email confirmation from the 'big guy' handling the print side of Photoshop. He stated that Apple killed the old CMProfileRef ColorSync APIs as we heard from simonsaith. Seems Q&E didn't test this and now, we begin this back and forth like years ago where Apple blames Adobe, Adobe blames Epson or Apple etc.

Some of us can reprofile over this new behavior but that's not an ideal fix. Bottom line: it's a bug. Adobe knows about it. Someone needs to fix it.

I'm still going to measure some targets to get an idea how far off this is, at least on an Epson 3880.

[Conrad_C]

Is this happening to everyone through both printer managed color and Lightroom/Photoshop managed color, or both? Just wondering if there a workaround along those lines.

[TheDigitalDog]

Conrad C wrote:

Is this happening to everyone through both printer managed color and Lightroom/Photoshop managed color, or both? Just wondering if there a workaround along those lines.

Not only isn't there a fix, I'm wondering if we can ever profile over this behavior! For those of us that can build custom profiles. We need to print targets without color management, can't do that in Photoshop or LR so I don't see how this new bug with the API's would affect the products used to print on the Mac in this mode. I can't fathom how this would fix anything now that I think of it. Best I figure we can do is roll back to older versions of PS/LR to print on Mac. Very sad.

[MarkDS]

Andrew, how do we roll back to the previous versions of both CC apps which worked correctly?

[TheDigitalDog]

MarkDS wrote:

Andrew, how do we roll back to the previous versions of both CC apps which worked correctly?

Good question, you'd need an older installer for CC. What I've done (and always do) is keep an older copy around, in my case, CS6. It prints just fine.

Adobe may need to provide an older installer, is that even available outside using CC to install? Never tried.

[Jao vdL]

MarkDS wrote:

Andrew, how do we roll back to the previous versions of both CC apps which worked correctly?

Adobe makes installers available for LR 6.0/2015.0 and you can download standalone upgraders for every version since. Go to this page: Install Photoshop Lightroom. Download the application installer for your OS and then download and apply the appropriate update (6.5.1 in this case). This will work for both the CC license and the standalone.

[MarkDS]

Thanks, that's helpful. Actually though, I need to use the previous version of Photoshop, not LR, because LR does not support Absolute Rendering Intent which I need for the research I'm doing. Is there a link to get that back also?

[Conrad_C]

MarkDS wrote:

Andrew, how do we roll back to the previous versions of both CC apps which worked correctly?

You can roll back using the Creative Cloud desktop application, although it's not easy to find. I wrote up the steps:

How to Install Earlier Versions of Creative Cloud Applications

If you have done this in earlier versions of the Creative Cloud desktop application, the way it works recently changed. I just updated the article to represent the way it currently works.

[Jao vdL]

Very nice writeup Conrad. I was just writing up the same thing while I was doing it on my machine through the creative cloud app but you were way ahead!

[Conrad_C]

Jao vdL wrote:

Very nice writeup Conrad. I was just writing up the same thing while I was doing it on my machine through the creative cloud app but you were way ahead!

Well, thank you for posting the list of Lightroom installers. I didn't have that link before, so I added it to the article because it's a more direct way to get to versions like Lightroom 6.5.1/2015.5.1.

[MarkDS]

Thanks ever so much Conrad. This may save my bacon for current work! I'll try it tomorrow.

[carl37]

I tried this but Lightroom does not show up in the list of previous versions list.  Photoshop does.  Very strange.

[Jao vdL]

Carl, for Lightroom follow the link and instructions I posted above for direct download from Adobe of precious versions. For Photoshop you have to do it through the CC app.

[MarkDS]

Jao, this is helpful, but I have a concern: the new version of LR has some very nifty new transform features that are great for correcting skewed perspectives. I usually wait about three months before downloading any new upgrades from Adobe, but this time went for it immediately to obtain those new features. As these features are not available in the previous version of LR, what happens to those edits using the new tools if one were to print from the older version - I assume they would be discarded. Or worse?

[Jao vdL]

No clue. Choice is probably between bad color and those transform edits at the moment. I haven't had to print yet luckily but will probably do so from an exported tiff in a previous version of photoshop when I need to.

[MarkDS]

Correct - means having to render the raw files, destroying for now one of LR's greatest workflow benefits.

[TheDigitalDog]

I want to reprint and test Photoshop CC 2015.5 vs. LR CC 2015.6 again because they are providing differences too large as well. I want to make sure I didn't pick the wrong RI between each print as a sanity check. But the differences between Photoshop CS6 and Photoshop CC 2015 are huge:

Difference between Photoshop CS6 and CC 2015.5

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dE Report

Number of Samples: 700

Delta-E Formula dE2000

Overall - (700 colors)

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Average dE:   3.23

    Max dE:  15.66

    Min dE:   0.07

StdDev dE:   3.01

Best 90% - (629 colors)

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Average dE:   2.36

    Max dE:   6.57

    Min dE:   0.07

StdDev dE:   1.27

Worst 10% - (71 colors)

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Average dE:  10.91

    Max dE:  15.66

    Min dE:   6.58

StdDev dE:   3.04

--------------------------------------------------

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Difference between Photoshop CC 2015.5 and Lightroom CC 2015.6:

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dE Report

Number of Samples: 700

Delta-E Formula dE2000

Overall - (700 colors)

--------------------------------------------------

Average dE:   2.28

    Max dE:   4.43

    Min dE:   0.25

StdDev dE:   0.83

Best 90% - (629 colors)

--------------------------------------------------

Average dE:   2.12

    Max dE:   3.33

    Min dE:   0.25

StdDev dE:   0.69

Worst 10% - (71 colors)

--------------------------------------------------

Average dE:   3.75

    Max dE:   4.43

    Min dE:   3.33

StdDev dE:   0.29

--------------------------------------------------

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ON this end, blues are most affected as you can see above when I sort by worst dE differences.