Photoshop does not have printer profile for my HP 451. Any advice?

[Sea Will]

My HP M451 laserjet printer is not supported by Photoshop in printer profiles. I show no HP printers. Am I doing something wrong?

[D Fosse · Accepted solution]

It's the printer manufacturer that provides profiles. If there are profiles available, they will be installed into the operating system when you install the printer software and driver.

Photoshop just reports what profiles are available from the operating system.

[thedigitaldog]

Pretty unlikely HP made a profile for that kind of printer (and the paper which is also key). 

You'll likely have to try Printer Manages Color and hope for the best. 

[Sea Will]

Thanks! I will give that a try. I have had an Epson printer with a profile for Single Weight MK black ink, and just tried it. The results were much better. I will see how the printer manages things.

[NB, colourmanagement net]

@thedigitaldog "You'll likely have to try Printer Manages Color and hope for the best. "

exactly what I was thinking, plus use the type of media that the printer was designed for, there may be an option to set media type (by name) in the printer driver (printer settings), make sure you get that right because it calls the hidden ICC printer/media profile which we hope HP put in there somewhere.

Alternatively - I did some testing on a very low cost HP desktop printer years ago and, actually, using 'Photoshop Manages Color' and selecting 'sRGB' as the output profile worked pretty well. HP were in on the birth of sRGB [wanting it to be the Esperanto of colour management] so it's not entirely surprising that in my example using sRGB worked quite well. 

I hope this helps
neil barstow, colourmanagement net - adobe forum volunteer - co-author: 'getting colour right'
google me "neil barstow colourmanagement" for lots of free articles on colour management