… at least for me. As soon as I went from PS CS2 to CS3, my prints came out 1.5 or 2 stops too dark. Drove me nutz.

Search on the web, and I see I’m hardly alone. Call Epson, and they admit it… but have been working on a fix for nearly a year now. Sigh.

Then tonight, I’m determined to find it, and I start mucking about. One of the things I did was turn on print preview, with my chosen paper profile. And on a whim, I clicked on “Preserve RGB numbers” and saw exactly what the printouts look like: way too dark. A clue!

Off to Adobe help, where I find that the definition of “Preserve RGB numbers” is ” Simulates how the colors will appear without being converted to the color space of the output device. “

Hmmm… is it possible that the output is not be converted to the printer’s color space for some reason?

If so why, and what can be done about it to fix it?

Off to look at my profiles… to discover that I have two full sets of Epson 3800 profiles… one at /Library/ColorSync/Profiles and another at /Library/Printers/EPSON/InkjetPrinter/ICCProfiles/Pro38.profiles.

Hmmm… do I have a conflict here? Should not be, but on a whim, I delete the batch of profiles at /Library/ColorSync/Profiles, and head back over to PS to see how thing work now.

And the result is… “things work now!”

No more excessively dark prints.

Is this the reason that it was so hard to find? Double profiles? Some had them and some didn’t? (The ones at /Library/Printers/EPSON/InkjetPrinter/ICCProfiles/Pro38.profiles are, in fact, inside that package, so not very obvious.)

Did I find it, or were the gods just smiling on me? Taking pity?

See if that is your circumstance; see if that fixes it for you.

Good luck!