Here’s yet another swing at the Presets issue by Don Quixote. Next year, I’ll get a life (maybe…)

This is a followup to my first posting here at https://valleau.art/blog/printer-presets-no-longer-working-right/

My presets have (knock on windmills) been OK for a few hours now.  The work for this post was done on a Mac Studio M2, running Tahoe 26.1 on Dec 9, 2025.

Let’s face it: Apple’s implementation of the “split presets” (print jobs and custom jobs) back in Ventura was “half-baked” at best, and has caused a few years of pain now, at least for some users. Unfortunately, the thing is still half-baked, and the bugs and poor design remain into Tahoe. What I have here is therefore not a fix, but a work-around, that will (at least in my own experience) allow you to create and use printer presets without corruption. It takes some setup, and a full acceptance of Print/Custom, along with a caveat or two.

Here’s the gist of it: Apple software is broken. A lot of the things that used to work no longer work and give unexpected results. However, there is a safe path through this minefield. That’s what this post shows: the path of least failure. Deviate at your own risk.

(I should note that everything here is based solely on my own individual experience. If something is wrong, there’s no one to blame but me.)

But at least presets are viable again.

Good Luck!

Tracy

—————————

What I suggest and did:

First: why not nuke and pave – reset the entire printing system? Well, that completely removes ALL your printers and you have to start over from scratch. I personally have 3 different label printers; three different full color printers and three Piezography B&W printers. Also a laser printer and a multifunction.

Starting from scratch (especially with the 3 quadtone Rip printers) would be a massive effort, reinstalling 9 different printers, and without any guarantee that all that time spent would actually fix anything.

So I opted to fix only the printer(s) where the presets kerfuffle actually shows up.

—

Overview:

1) reset all the default printer settings using CUPS. 

2) delete current settings

3) create each and every new Print Job preset begining with the Default Settings and NOT with an existing preset. 

4) if you alter a preset and want to save it for future use, you MUST use a CUSTOM preset.

Details:

Here’s what has worked for me:

FIRST:
If you have a load of presets for your printer, take a look at them, make screenshots or otherwise record them because you’re going to remake them all over again.

STEP ONE:

CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) is here: in your browser at http://localhost:631. The login is your own login to your mac, name & password. If you are asked to activate the web interface, launch the Terminal app, and paste in  this phrase,  “cupsctl WebInterface=yes” and hit the enter key.  I suggest you just copy/paste the phrase without the quote marks.

Select “printers” from the meu bar and from the list click on yours. From the resulting Administration menu, choose “set default options”.

Here’s your chance to set your most commonly used settings. I suggest you do that. The Default Settings will become the basis of all your subsequent presets, so you can save yourself time by having it default to your most commonly used preset options. This will leave you with less to do when you create a new one. Note that the list has about 60 options  most of which you will not need, and is several screens long, so be sure to go all the way through it, because the save/update button “set default options” is at the very bottom.

I suggest that you do NOT leave the main ones, such as paper, blank. Put in something that you use a lot and will help you quickly see that you, in fact, selected the default preset.

Once you have saved your new default settings, you can exit. (Before you leave, it wouldn’t hurt to do a similar ‘refresh’ for each of the printers listed.)

(Why do this? It’s possible that after years of use, and various iterations, the saved setup may have become corrupted for any number of reasons. Can I swear this CUPS rewrite is really necessary? Nope. But as a retired programmer (“been there, done that”) I can say that it’s quite possible. Either way, it certainly won’t hurt to have fresh, clean files behind the scenes. Upshot: just do it. It’s only a one-time thing.)

STEP TWO:
Visit ~/library/preferences/
and find “com.apple.print.custompresets.forprinter.[name].plist” (where [name] is your printer.

(Optional, but wise) Save those current presets by zipping up that plist, and moving it somewhere else.

Trash the plist itself.

STEP THREE:

Reboot your computer. Load your printing software and check to make sure all the previous presets are gone, and you have only “Default Settings” at the top of the presets popup menu. If you still have presets, you trashed the wrong plist. Put it back and find the right one.

When you see an empty presets list you can empty the trash. 

MAKING A NEW PRESET

Notes:

1) it was necessary for my printers to be turned ON for this process. With my 3880 QuadTone RIP printer, if it was off, the setting did not “stick’.

2) Further: I made the presets by accessing “Page Setup: Paper & Print settings…” (above item #2, in the image above) and NOT by hitting “Print” to bring it up.

3) Finally, I always use “OK” and never the “Cancel” button inside the Print window – specifically within the “printer options” section of that print dialog. “Printer options” offers color matching, printer settings, roll paper settings, advanced paper control, and HDD settings. Each one of these brings up a set of choices that are either confirmed with the “OK” button or (supposedly) unchanged using the “Cancel” button. (This is entirely internal to Apple, and NOT handled by any application.  It is broken. The “Cancel” button will “magically” alter your presets! DO NOT SELECT “CANCEL.” If  you want to cancel a change you made, you need to  accept the alteration anyway, by hitting the “OK” button, and then go back in again and change the setting back to what you want. Again: “Cancel” will corrupt your settings.

4) Pay attention. Always check that your desired presets are correct before choosing to save your preset. You can be pretty sure that if you accidentally hit the “Cancel” button to back out, things will NOT be OK!

FROM NOW ON, you will use that Default Settings preset as your starting point for all new PRINT JOB presets. This method creates a pristine new PRINT JOB preset each time, based on the Default Settings  you created in CUPS for your printer.

Why use PRINT JOBS? Because those are the base from which you make your CUSTOM JOBS.

Let’s say you have 3 papers: Velvet Fine Art (VFA), RAG Photographique (RP) and Hot Press Natural (HPN). You would select the Default Settings preset and from there set up a preset with your chosen ink, bit-depth, print speed, DPI and so on for (let’s say) VFA. Next save it as a PRINT JOB named “VFA” for just the printer involved.

Now go back and load up “Default Settings” again. Make the same changes for RP, and again save it as a PRINT JOB, named (say) “RP”.

For the third paper, go back and yet again load up “Default Settings” and create a new PRINT JOB named “HPN.”

Now you have three print jobs showing in your main presets list for your chosen printer.

Since the whole point of presets is your convenience, so lets make two variations of (say) the VFA paper: one for quick sanity-check prints, and one for the final print that will be hanging in MOMA.

Load up the VFA print job you just created. Change it so that it’s 1440 and bidirectional. Go back to the presets menu and choose “save current settings as preset…” (just like you did above to make the PRINT Jobs) but this time choose to save it as a CUSTOM JOB. Make sure the name is clear to you, such as “VFA Fast.”  (I’d also choose to make it for the given printer, instead of “all printers”. YMMV.)

Go back and reload the VFA PRINT JOB again, and alter it for 2880 and unidirectional. Save that as a CUSTOM JOB similarly, but name it “VFA Slow”.

You now have three presets for your printer when using VFA paper.

TO USE THESE:

if you want a quick test print, from the popup presets menu, choose “presets…” and then the saved CUSTOM “VFA fast”. (There is a “gotcha” here however. If is physically possible for you to select one PRINT job and use the CUSTOM job from another paper. This is NOT what you want 99% of the time. You should either choose the print job preset and then the custom preset OR choose “Default Settings” and then select a CUSTOM preset. Doing that, choosing the CUSTOM will load the proper PRINT JOB setup correctly.)

Side note:

Before Apple split presets into PRINT JOBS and CUSTOM presets, we would make new presets by simply chaning an existing one, and save it with a new name. It’s not that simple any more. 
If you want to a variation of an existing print preset,  load up whatever you want to use as the base (say Velvet Fine Art) and make your changes, but then (as just explained) you >>MUST<< save that as a CUSTOM Preset, NOT a PRINT JOB preset! (My experience with taking an existing PRINT JOB preset, and creating a variation of it, and then saving that out as a PRINT JOB again is -wrong-, and leads to corruption. It appears that the Apple OS -knows- it’s a variation (aka CUSTOM) and saves different data, which when mistakenly saving as a PRINT Job instead, may result in a corrupted preset.)

My presets are generally on a per-paper basis, with perhaps a set of different paper sizes (VFA 8×10; VFA 13×19 etc) or print density/passes (1440 bidirectional vs 2880 unidirectional) or roll vs sheet, etc. Those variations would be saved as a CUSTOM Preset.

My presets also apply specifically to one printer. My label printers have no use for fine-art printer presets, and I don’t want to wade through them when they don’t apply.

WHERE ARE MY NEW PRESETS?
If you are using CUSTOM Presets, you must remember that they ARE NOT LISTED directly in the presets popup list. That list is for PRINT JOBS. If you have CUSTOM presets, they will be listed in the -submenu- “PRESETS” in the main presets popup, above the print jobs.

Here’s the SUMMARY

1) visit CUPS and make a new Default Settings for your printer.

2) visit library preferences and delete the old presets.plist

3) reboot

4) use “Default Settings” to create individual PRINT JOBS for each paper, and for your specific printer.

6) using that PRINT JOB create variations and save each as a CUSTOM JOB.

Repeat steps 4 and 5 to make new presets.

Note:  a PRINT job should never be saved on top of a previous one, with an eye to replacing it. That worked fine for years (decades?) but not so much anymore. Now you need to make a new one from your Default Settings.

And… when reviewing settings during use, click the OK button to dismiss the dialog box. Do not click “Cancel” as it may not be safe to do so. (Myself and others have experienced a “cancel” click causing unexpected results.)

________________________________________________________________________

One Last Thing:

How did Apple screw this up?  I have a hypothesis, and it’s only and no more than that  –  my best guess.

The basic mistake was to allow a what should have been a CUSTOM JOB to be saved as a PRINT JOB. That is, a variation on an existing PRINT JOB >>needs<< to be saved as a CUSTOM JOB. It turns out that the OS knows when you’re “subsetting” a PRINT JOB.  Knowing that, they should not offer the ‘save as Print Job’ button if it’s really a subset of the main job that you are saving. That may, in the current state of things, yeild a corrupted print job, with cascadingly serious results.

At least that’s what it looks like to me as of now… but I’ve been wrong before.  (in 1957, I think)  

This has worked for me, and I hope it will do the same for you.

Finally, my thanks for Joseph Holmes and Roy Harrington for their interest, encouragement, advice and unflagging patience & courtesy.

As I push toward 80, I’ll admit I find it easier to stay home and make prints than to go out and take photos. And, as many of you know, one of my joys is making prints on paper, whether my own images or those of others.

To that end, I’m please to let you know that I was recently honored by Canson-Infinity with a Certified Print Lab seal, “…representing expertise in Fine Art printing.” Canson, founded in 1557, has produced some of the world’s finest papers, used by Picasso, Degas, Matisse, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Monet.

Canson says: “The Certified Print Labs are a network of ‘best in class’ studios and boutique labs based around the world. All the partners have completed a technical evaluation and offer the best print quality on Canson Infinity papers, combined with excellent service. The network offers services for photographers, printmakers & artists looking for excellent quality and service.”

Near as I can tell, I’m the only such certified printer between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Personally, I’m delighted because I have favored Canson Infinity and Arches papers for almost two decades now. I like the way their papers take the ink, and the gamut they can handle. Certainly there are other papers I use, but images just seem to look more elegant on Canson papers.

Prints are usually $85 each, and that includes paper, ink, and 30-60 minutes of cleanup, adjusting, and other prep for making an exceptional print.

Please feel free to pass this information along to others who might need my services, and keep me in mind for printing your next show or gallery pieces.

I’ve got a website for this service: https://itstheprint.com

Stay well!

Tracy

So, let’s take a quick look at it.

Perhaps you’re old enough to remember the Weston Lightmeter:

It had a “photovoltaic cell” (don’t panic) which is simply some goop which when exposed to light generates a very tiny electrical current. The brighter the light, the greater the current, and the greater the current, the farther the little needle on the display would swing to the right. Underneath the needle is a printed chart, with numbers, so your light meter reading was simply the number that was underneath the needle when it stopped moving.

In other words, the light meter effectively measured the “luminosity” (intensity/brightness of the light) in any given environment.

Now, if you were to cover the front of the meter, where the photovoltaic cell lives, with say blue cellophane, then only the blue light would enter, and you’d be measuring the luminosity of the blue light only. If you wanted to know the luminosity of only the green or red part of the spectrum, you’d just cover the cell with green (or red) cellophane.

OK: simple enough… but that is exactly how your digital camera captures the data it needs to (later) make an image.

The sensor in your camera, which gets exposed to light when you push the shutter release button, is (in the miracle of modern technology) covered in a checker-board pattern, with literally millions of “little Weston meters”… and each one has a piece of colored cellophane (aka a “filter”) on it, either red or green or blue. (The actual arrangement of those filters is called a Bayer pattern.)  Here’s what it looks like:

So, when the sensor is exposed to light, each sensor cell records a single number that is relative to the intensity of light at that location on the sensor. In the image above, that would look like this:

(I’m making up the numbers, of course, for this example>)

(Row 1)   green = 300    red = 55  green = 340   red = 66 

(Row 2)  blue = 4000   green = 421  blue  = 3980  green = 345

(Row 3)  green = 298    red = 66  green = 302   red = 75

(Row 4)  blue = 4100   green = 407  blue  = 4009  green = 301

If you were going to save those 16 cells (or all  millions of them) to memory or on a disk, the data for that group, as seen in the recording, would be:

300 55 340 66
4000 4213 980 345
298 66 302 75
4100 407 4009 301

or really more like this, all run together:

300 55 340 66 4000 4213 980 345 298 66 302 75 4100 407 4009 301

Those individual cells are called “photosites” or sometimes “sensels”, but you’ll notice that each one records the intensity of only one color. The whole thing is called a “mosaic” since that’s what it looks like.  They are NOT called “pixels”  (which are on your monitor or printed photography because “pixel” is from an image, and is a single cell with all three values, red, green and blue, so that you get full color in each place, not just one color.)

That is what a ‘raw’ (which means not finished, or not cooked if you prefer) file is: a long string of numbers representing the luminosity intensity values straight from the camera sensor.

—-

Obviously however, that’s not an image – it’s just a bunch of data. Even more apparent is that each cell as recorded is not “full color” but only the intensity of red, green or blue.

Where does the full color image (with a lot more colors than only red, green or blue) come from?

Computer magic: that mosaic is run through software which “demosaics” it. The software looks at all the surrounding cells, RGB,  and extrapolates (figures out) what the full color of each pixel (now is the time to call it a pixel) should be, and saves each cell with three numbers: a value for red, a value for blue, and a value for green. A pixel is a “picture element” which has a RGB component to it.

The data might look like this:

(Row 1, Cell 1)     red = 255  green = 133   blue = 18

(Row 1, Cell 2)     red = 255  green = 131   blue = 19

(Row 1, Cell 3)     red = 254  green = 136   blue = 21

(Row 1, Cell 4)     red = 253  green = 140   blue = 22

or those 4 cells just from Row 1 above:

255 133 18
255 131 19
254 136 21
253 140 22

aka

255 133 18 255 131 19 254 136 21 253 140 22

In the image file, instead of one number per cell,  there are now three numbers per cell representing the full R, G, B value of that single pixel.

After fully demosaicing the data from the sensor/raw file (which itself remains unchanged ) those extrapolated values are saved into a new, different and familiar “image” file, such as a jpg or tif. Now you have two files: a raw file (in which the original data is unchanged) and a new image file (full  of new data).

Let’s say you have a bag of groceries, including, flour, eggs, sugar and milk.

A “raw” file is more like the bag of uncooked groceries, while an “image” file is more like a finished cake.

Well, that’s the gist of it. Vastly oversimplified of course,  but that’s basically how it all works.

HTH

addendum:

about editing a raw file: You don’t. The raw file data remains the same. The changes are applied when you demosaic the raw file into a bit-map file.

In digital photography, the “sidecar” file associated with a raw image file typically contains metadata and adjustments made to the image, including exposure adjustments, white balance, and other non-destructive edits. The sidecar file is often in XML format (commonly using the .xmp extension) and is separate from the original raw image file.

The sidecar file records the changes you’ve made to the image in your editing software without altering the original RAW data. When you open the raw file in the same or compatible software, these adjustments are applied according to the information stored in the sidecar file. This allows for flexibility, as you can adjust or revert changes without losing any original image data.

Here is how to print a target of patches, for use in creating a custom color profile. (Note: this requires that you either have your own spectrophotometer, or are printing a target sent to you by someone you hired to create the custom profile for you.)

A target image is composed of hundreds or thousands of little color patches. The profiling software knows exactly what those colors are. So if printed correctly (as in “unaltered”) then the spectrophotometer can read t he printed value; compare it to the correct value, and create a profile. Obviously then, when you print that target on your computer, you do NOT want anything to change the colors accidentally! In other words, “color management” must be OFF.

Macs are notoriously difficult to print a “pure, unmanaged” color patch target without corrupting it.

The usual advice used to be to use Adobe’s Color Print Utility (CPU), but unfortunately, CPU is no longer supported on Catalina or later.

However, if you are printing from a Windows machine, you can still use the Adobe CPU: (https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/no-color-management-option-missing.html)

Most pros will say to use Print Tool from Roy Harrington. (http://www.quadtonerip.com/html/QTRprinttool.html)

[FWIW, I too recommend this product and use it for all my printing, but it’s not free. Since it is also a RIP, it does FAR more than just print clean targets. IMHO it will be the best $50 you’ve spent lately.]

Or you can use the (free) software you already have: ColorSync Utility. It’s in your “Utilities” folder. It’s more fussy to use than Print Tool, but it works. 

Here’s how to print an unmodified, clean target using Apple’s ColorSync.

LATEST version of CS

1. run colorsync and choose file/open and load the target. (The target MUST NOT have an assigned profile!)
2. across the bottom of the window, you will see three popup menus. Set them to “Match to Profile”  “None” and “Relative Colormetric (media relative)”
3. choose File – Print from the main menu
4. in the resulting dialog box, twirl down the arrow to see the contents of “Color Sync”
5. at “Color:” change the popup menu selection to “Print as color target” (If it’s grayed out, you likely have a profile assigned to the image. See the built-in ColorSync “help”.)
6. finally, select “Print”

OLDER version:

1. run colorsync and choose file/open and load the target
2. choose Print and select your desired printer
3. select “color matching” from the popup menu
4. choose any profile, except “automatic” – I use ARGB1998
5. from the same popup menu choose the top item: “colorsync utility”
6. from the “Color:” menu, choose “Print as Color Target”
7. Finally, select “Print”

HTH

Tracy

Why? Because they screw up your ability to see tones properly. Using a dark background will trick your mind into producing a print that has clogged up shadows, and is overall too dark.

Don’t believe me? Check out the image below.

See that grey band in the middle? It is exactly the same shade of gray all the way across. The left end is NOT lighter than then right end.

Take a look at squares A & B, below.

A & B are exactly the same shade of gray” (RGB 110,110, 110). 

This is built-in our human perception. You can look at the A/B image above all day, and B will always look lighter to you than A.

Upshot? Your editing environment really does have an effict on the work you produce. Don’t use dark backgrounds for editing photos.

Set your editing tool to as light an environment as you can, and change the background to white, to keep your brain from messing with you!

When “good enough” isn’t: canned paper profiles

In my business (making prints for museums and galleries) the usual prebuilt paper/ink profile, often described as “good enough” really isn’t. Instead I make my own profiles using X-Rite’s i1Publish Pro 3. If that applies to you as well, here are some tips:

Printing on expensive paper is, er, expensive, so I print the calibration target on a single sheet of 13 x 19 paper. I print 1586 patches because this number gives a chart with 30 shades of black, from white to darkest black. Choosing some other number of patches may only offer 10 or 12 luminosity values. The greater number helps your textures stand out.

The patches are 0.340″ wide and 0.302″ tall, allowing the full 1586 to be printed on a single sheet.

Also, at least with Epson printers, I print the chart using the same DPI (1440/2880) as my final prints. That’s because 1440 shows more paper-white than 2880, and thus the patches are less dense when read by the spectrophotometer. In other words, the resulting profile is different with different DPI.

I allow the print to dry for 24 hours before reading it. This is critical for matte paper in particular.

I do not have a mechanized reader, so do the scanning my hand, using the supplied tools. I time a single pass of the scanner to take at least 4 seconds. The chart has 28 columns, so I’m reading 7 of them each second. The version 3 hardware scans at 400 samples per second, so each patch is getting about 60 samples. (This is about the same time that X-Rite’s mechanical arm takes on a single pass.)

Also, I find it easier to maintain even speed during a single pass to push or pull the spectro unit (instead of swiping left or right) and so turn the table 90 degrees.

Finally (and this will depend on your printer) I add a bit of smoothing to the profile, slightly beyond the default 50%.

I hope these tips help my fellow i1Publish Pro users make better profiles.

You would not take a flashlight and cover the end with blue cellophane, and shine it on the print, because it would trash all the other colors. To get a more rational view, you might take it outside and look at it in the sunshine, which has a balance of all the colors, right?

As a print-maker, you want to have a lightbulb you can use indoors that shows all the colors evenly (unlike the blue flashlight) and thus similar to sunshine.

The color temperature of sunshine is agreed to be about 5000K. Lower temperature is “warm” (making white paper look orange-ish) and higher is “cool” (making white paper look bluer).

But besides the color temperature, sunlight is also a reference to all the colors in balanced amounts. How close any lightbulb comes to that even balance is the bulb’s CRI, Color Rendering Index. By definition, sunlight’s CRI is 100. Fluorescent bulbs usually have a CRI of 80 or less, while specialized bulbs can get to 95 or more. 

Unlike sunlight, all bulbs have a spectrum where some colors have more energy than other colors. Fluorescents, for example, exaggerate the green and orange dramatically, and the emission graph looks like a saw tooth blade. Most LEDs peak in the dark blue and greens. Sunlight however has no peaks or valleys, and is a smooth, nearly horizontal graph. 

Fluorescents and LEDs have low CRI, and so you are seeing exaggerations of some parts of the spectrum and a muting of other parts. No good if you’re trying to analyze a print.

Generally speaking, any CRI above 93 or so is suitable for viewing photos, but the closer you get to 100, the better. Such bulbs are usually expensive, often in the $20-$40 range. Solux “museum” bulbs were 4700 K, about 94 CRI and $30 each.

All that leads here: I have found standard base lightbulbs, with 5000K temperature, and a CRI of 98 (which is amazing) and furthermore are LEDs, using less electricity than halogen or tungsten.

AND… they are less than $3 each.

So I’m sharing what I use with all the photographers I know. You can buy them on Amazon. Here is the URL:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BNBN5TY4/

Finally, if you’ve never had such a light before, it will take 2 or 3 days for your brain to adjust to it. As my drill instructor used to say “Suck it up sweetheart. You’ll get used to it.” (For you cynics: no, I do not benefit from this recommendation. It’s entirely altruistic.)

In my business (making prints for museums and galleries) the usual prebuilt paper/ink profile, often described as “good enough” really isn’t. Instead I make my own profiles using X-Rite’s i1Publish Pro 3. If that applies to you as well, here are some tips:

Printing on expensive paper is, er, expensive, so I print the calibration target on a single sheet of 13 x 19 paper. I print 1586 patches because this number gives a chart with 30 shades of black, from white to darkest black. Choosing some other number of patches may only offer 10 or 12 luminosity values. The greater number helps your textures stand out.

The patches are 0.340″ wide and 0.302″ tall, allowing the full 1586 to be printed on a single sheet.

Also, at least with Epson printers, I print the chart using the same DPI (1440/2880) as my final prints. That’s because 1440 shows more paper-white than 2880, and thus the patches are less dense when read by the spectrophotometer. In other words, the resulting profile is different with different DPI.

I allow the print to dry for 24 hours before reading it. This is critical for matte paper in particular.

I do not have a mechanized reader, so do the scanning my hand, using the supplied tools. I time a single pass of the scanner to take at least 4 seconds. The chart has 28 columns, so I’m reading 7 of them each second. The version 3 hardware scans at 400 samples per second, so each patch is getting about 60 samples. (This is about the same time that X-Rite’s mechanical arm takes on a single pass.)

Also, I find it easier to maintain even speed during a single pass to push or pull the spectro unit (instead of swiping left or right) and so turn the table 90 degrees.

Finally (and this will depend on your printer) I add a bit of smoothing to the profile, slightly beyond the default 50%.

I hope these tips help my fellow i1Publish Pro users make better profiles.

CONSIDER THIS POST OBSOLETE! REFER TO THE POST ABOVE.

(If you are here for the technical details, scroll down to “The Gory Details” (or to the bottom of the page, and then back up to above the screenshots.)

Original post:

Well, I have good news, bad news and sorta between.

The good news is that now I know why some user-saved custom printer presets fail spectacularly in MacOS Ventura and Sonoma. (Failure: user saves a paper type, print speed, sheet size, feed type and so on under a special name as a new preset. However when it’s reloaded that information is wrong: sheet feed becomes roll; 1440 bi directional become 2880 unidirectional and more.)

This has made printer presets effectively useless, and for those who previously had dozens of them, having to remake all the settings by hand for every single print is tedious, time-consuming, and fraught with potential error, wasting expensive paper and ink.

This has been going on for years now, and resulted in a lot of finger pointing, but no fix.

The malfunction happens during the save new preset process. The data saved is missing some needed parts; it is incomplete. Instead of the need 90-ish entries, there are only about 10 actually saved.  So, when it’s loaded back in, the computer is looking for settings it needs, and they simply are not there. Without the needed settings, chaos breaks out. *

The bad news is that I cannot fix it, since the failure to save correctly lies within Apple’s own code library. I can see the problem, but since I don’t have access to the code a fix is beyond my reach. There’s nothing I can do except point out the problem to Apple, which I have already done.

That said, the sorta-between-news is that I have a work-around for myself, which was to delete and rebuild all the presets. I believe that any printing application that works properly will succeed in rebuilding your presets. Personally, I used Roy Harrington’s excellent Print Tool.

Here are the steps:

(deleted.)

PLEASE SEE THE LATEST POST, LISTED ABOVE, OR BY CLICKING HERE.

* The gory (TECHNICAL) details:

The problem began when Apple did a massive revision of the printing system in Ventura IIRC, and split presents into “Types” – Custom Preset and Print Job Preset. Theoretically, the Print Job Preset is the main (aka, the old way) one, and the Custom Preset is a variation, based on the Print Job Preset, but with a small difference, such as paper size.

So this means that the Custom Preset contains only the snippets of code that are different from the Print Job. Custom Presets do not have the full complement of data needed, and rely on having a correctly filled in and functioning Print Job Preset.

I believe that the problem is, that the system does not handle this correctly, and allows the Print Job Preset to be altered to contain only subset of information from the Custom Preset. This wipes out about 80 necessary setting from the Print Job.

This is clearly evident in the screenshots below.

I spoke directly to the actual programmers at DxO (not support staff) and asked if they are doing anything different, since all their presets are complete. They said they are just using the Apple API and not doing anything special. Then I looked into the Xcode developer docs on printing, and there is no provision for third-party control.

Upshot: it’s not a third-party issue.

However, since carefully roto-rootering the existing presets and starting completely from scratch for a given printer does work using DxO Photolab, it appears that the problem is as I described.

It -may- be the case that if one deletes the existing printer presets as described in my post, and starts over using ONLY Print Job Presets, some success may follow. 

Specifically, each preset entry includes a dictionary type “com.apple.print.preset.settings” which should contain about 90 key/value entries. If it does, the preset works fine. In many app-saved presets however that dictionary contains a random number of entires with random values, usually 10 or less, and those presets fail to load and function properly.

See the attached screenshots below to compare bad presets (on the left) with a good one on the right.

—

Tracy

The left hand column show that there are only a few entires in changed plists, while the right hand one shows that there are nearly 90 entries in a working plist.

Below is a verification of this: I took “DxO Fast”, made a few changes, and saved as a project job with the name “DxO Fast changed”. You can see why “DxO Fast changed” will not work: it has only 5 entries.

for those who want them, here are the actual plists, one good  and one bad.

https://transfer.pronet.link/transfers/Printer-Setup-plists.zip

There does seem to be a bit of confusion, or at least uncertainty here, and as usual, a lot of it comes from not using the correct words for your intended meaning. (Or, I just misread what I ran across here… )

-Regarding your monitor, there is ***calibrating*** AND there is ***profiling***. (These are often done by the same software/hardware, with the calibration first, followed by profiling.) They are not the same thing.

***Calibration*** is getting the brightness, and gamma correct. By correct, I mean that the R, G and B, when given equal numerical values, should produce a shade of gray, with no color tinting at all.

So, Red 128, Green 128, and Blue 128 should give you middle gray, while 200,200,200 would be very light gray and 60,60,60 would be very dark gray. Thing is, your monitor is different from every other monitor in the world, and it’s extremely likely that those perfectly matched numbers are off by a bit. The blue may be a bit stronger, and leave a blue tint, or the green or red could be too bright or too dark. The process of ***calibration*** then uses your hardware puck to read known values of various shades of RGB and make an adjustment to those colors so that your monitor will put out a true gray tone, and not one that is “almost” gray, when presented with equal RGB values.

Obviously if your monitor is not “gray balanced” then everything else you do on it will be equally out of shape.

So, part one is that you MUST begin with a **calibrated** monitor. 

Calibration is an adjustment of the device itself – in this case your monitor.

Next, we ***profile*** the monitor. It’s quite similar, but instead of aiming for a correct, un-tinted gray, we aim for known COLOR values. The software will put up a long sequence of colors, in various intensities (luminosity) then read and record the results.

The software knows (since it’s generating those color patches) what the value _should_ be, and compares it to what the hardware actually reads as shown on your screen.

(How do we know those reading-numbers are valid? Because we -calibrated- the monitor in step one, above.)

Unlike making an _adjustment_ of an actual device, profiling _measures_ results.

And, just as we expected variations from the ideal when calibrating, we expect the same when reading known colors. A patch of blue that should be 76, 135, 201 may actually read 78 134, 204 (too red, not green enough, and overly blue).

The profile does this for from 10’s to 100’s of colors, according to your settings when you run the profile. (Yes, more patches equals greater color fidelity.)

That resulting table of numbers is your monitor’s -profile-. (I’m oversimplifying here, but that’s basically it.)

If you’re following along closely, you can see that if you make a profile using a bright monitor, the color-number readings will be different from the same profile made from a monitor with the brightness turned down.

So, last but not least: DO NOT change the brightness or any other settings on your monitor after you have calibrated and profiled your monitor! These are controlled by knobs, buttons, sliders or whatever on the -hardware- that is your monitor. The -software- you are running (including the image profile) has no way to make physical changes to your monitor, so leave it all alone!

An sRGB image from a friend will look correct on your monitor, as will an AdobeRGB from your own camera.(** see below) You have finally got it to a place where it can handle anything that has a profile embedded. If you have a workspace mismatch between the image and Photoshop, PS will ask if you want to switch to the image’s workspace. (The answer is “yes” 99% of the time.)

That’s the whole point of going through all this in the first place! The CMM (Color Management Module) will take the profile from the sRGB image, and using the PCS and your monitor profile, show you what your friend saw when he sent it to you. You don’t have to do anything more but to open it up in a color-managed application, such as Photoshop.

Do not even consider trying to edit and/or print an image from monitor that has not been calibrated and profiled, unless you enjoy sword-fighting with Zorro.

Do not ever set your monitor profile to anything other than the profile you just so painstakingly created. Absolutely do not set it to sRGB or AdobeRGB, as that would be like taking a nice full basket of ripe apples, and replacing the contents with rocks. 

* Notes and caveats

Obvious caveat #1: your monitor has to have a gamut that can display the full size of the working space. Virtually all devices can display sRGB accurately. Spend more money for a “wide gamut” monitor, and you can see not only the sRGB, but the Adobe RGB space as well. Other monitors have different working spaces. If you are working to make prints, you probably want AdobeRGB since it was designed to bridge from the digital domain to the CMYK of printers, and also offer a more nuanced color range. sRGB is ideal for digital display, such as the internet. DCI-P3 is best for video.

 JPEGs usually have an embedded colorspace profile for the image. Usually sRGB, but others could have been used. Raw (“raw” not “RAW”) files do not exist in a color space, and so do not have embedded profiles. (Well… some raw files actually embed a sRGB jpg image in the raw data, and that may have a profile attached, but a raw file is a file, not an image.) 

 You can convert “down” from AdobeRGB to sRGB pretty successfully, but not from sRGB to AdobeRGB, since there is no way to magically “upscale” the sRGB gamut. 

 Monitors come with different bit-depths, and a 10-bit monitor will show more (not wider, but more nuanced) colors than an 8-bit. This most obviously appears in dramatically reduced banding in transition areas, such as the sky. In a better-than-average world you have a 10-bit, wide-gamut monitor.

 ** Profile conversion

 The monitor profile all by itself is not useful, because in fact, it takes -two- profiles to work with images: the one for your monitor and the one from the image file. And to get them to work together, there is a place where they meet: the “Profile Connection Space” (PCS) which is an idealized colorspace that includes the range of human vision. To make things work, so that a given image appears correctly on a given profiled monitor, the monitor profile-numbers point to a given color in the PCS. Then that same color is pointed at by the profile-numbers from the image (sRGB or ARGB or whatever). The monitor profile will be off by thus-and-such, while the image file will be off by this-and-that. The Color Management System (CMS) does the necessary math to make the Just-so Yellow RGB values in the image translate to new RGB values in the monitor so that the yellow appears identical.

and…THAT is why you don’t want to change your monitor profile or otherwise adjust your monitor.

Yeah: to some extent at least, this stuff is rocket science…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_management

https://www.viewsonic.com/library/photography/color-management-guide/ (for beginners)

https://color.org/ (for not-beginners)