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buy should come with a driver on a CD (or you can easily download one) and the installation procedure should install a set of canned profiles that will work when using the proprietary inks designed to be used with the printer and for a limited range of branded papers. The canned profiles that ship with the latest Epson printers, for their Epson papers, tend to be of a very high quality and these are all you really need for professional print results. However, it is recommended that you carry out custom profiling to build profiles for other types of print/paper combinations. This can be done by printing out a test target like the one shown in Figure 12.11 without color managing it. Once the test print has been allowed to stabilize, it can be measured the following day with a device like the X-Rite Eye-One spectrophotometer (Figure 12.12). The patch measurement results can then be used to build a color profile for the printer. The other alternative is to take advantage of Neil Barstow's remote profiling service special offer which is available to readers (see the back of the book). If you wish to use custom printer profiles, you'll need one to be built for each printer/media combination. You can use a profiled printer to achieve good CMYK proofing, even from a modestly priced printer, which comes close to matching the quality of a recognized contract proof printer.

Figure 12.11 This Kodak™ color target can be used to construct a color ICC profile. A profile service company will normally supply you with instructions on how to print it out. When they receive your prints, they can measure these and email the custom ICC profile back to you. For example, Neil Barstow of www.colourmanagement.net is offering a special discount rate to readers of this book (see the back of the book for more details).

Figure 12.12 Once a print profile has been printed out, the color patches can be read using a spectrophotometer and the measurements used to build an ICC profile.

Photoshop color management interface

By now you should be acquainted with the basic principles of Photoshop ICC color management (see Figure 12.13). It is relatively easy to configure the Photoshop system and at the simplest level all you have to do is calibrate and profile your display and then go to the Photoshop Color Settings (Figure 12.14) and select an appropriate prepress setting (don't use the default). A prepress setting will correctly enable the Photoshop color management policies and should be enough to get you up and running in a color managed workflow. But if you want to discover more about how color management works, then do read on.

Figure 12.13 This illustration re-examines the problem encountered at the beginning of this chapter where the skin tones in the original image printed too blue. In the upper workflow no printer profile was used and the image data was sent directly to the printer with no adjustment made to the image data. In the lower example I show a profile color managed workflow. The profile created for this particular printer is used to convert the image data to that of the printer's color space before being sent to the printer. The (normally hidden) color shifting which occurs during the profile conversion process compensates by making the skin tone colors more red, but applies less color compensation to other colors. The result is an output that more closely matches the original. This is a simple illustration of the ICC-based color management system at work. All color can be managed this way in Photoshop, from capture source to the computer display and to the final print.

Figure 12.14 All the Photoshop color settings can be managed from within the Photoshop Color Settings dialog. Photoshop conveniently ships with various preset settings that are suited to different Photoshop work flows. Unfortunately, the default setting is not an ideal choice for a color managed workflow, so use the Settings menu shown in Figure 12.15 to switch to a prepress setting such as the one shown here. As you move the cursor pointer around the