Color Management with Pixma G620

[Thai4Me]

Has anyone successfully used this printer in a color managed workflow with Lightroom?  

I have calibrated my monitor and produced a custom printer profile for a specific Canon brand paper.

I have disabled the printer’s color management to allow LR to apply the custom printer profile.

Despite this, the color is way off.  To ensure the printer itself is ok, I did a quick print using Canon’s Easy Print software (allowing the printer to apply whatever “color management” it uses).  The print was much more of a match to the monitor (and reality).

I would like to be able to use a more exacting color workflow and wondering anyone else’s experience with this printer.

Thanks.

[Tim_B]

I’m having a similar issue trying to print from Photoshop on Windows 10 (x64). PS managing the color profile, disabling color profile in the print driver, output is nowhere near what I’m seeing on the screen.

I tried following the instructions here: https://support.usa.canon.com/kb/index?page=content&id=ART159211

I could only find one ICC profile available for this printer, and it seems to be dated back to 2015. Quite frustrating.

[Thai4Me]

Tim—I should tell you that I was able to produce a custom profile (XRite) that worked very well.  My initial attempt was hampered by me not paying to attention to print the targets for the profile with NO ICC adjustments whatsoever.  I thought you would want to know that a good ICC profile for the printer CAN be created and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the printer in terms of a color managed workflow.

[Tim_B]

Hi Thai4Me, Can you share more details on how you created the custom profile? XRite looks like they have some very expensive stuff, out of my price range. But maybe there’s similar products that will work with whatever steps you took? Thank you.

[Thai4Me]

Hi Tim-I have had a couple of devices, the most recent is an XRIte Studio (apparently XRite offloaded all these types of devices to another company, Calibrate).  [Removed 3rd Party link per community guidelines.]

The nice thing about this particular device is it allows one to calibrate their monitor as well as produce custom printer profiles which are arguably better than one’s included with the printer as they are produced on YOUR printer with YOUR paper choice.

The process is fairly straightforward:  Launch software included with the device and then print out a couple of “targets” (Two 8.5x11 pages with a bunch of colored squares).  You then use the device to scan the targets.  The software then analyzes YOUR printer’s version of the colors and creates a “profile” to adjust the colors to what they ‘should’ look like.  The nice thing is you can create multiple profiles for all different types of paper you have.  Being able to accurately print out what you see on your (calibrated) monitor, saves a lot of paper in the long run.

It is true that these devices are expensive—there may be less expensive versions out there (I know for sure there are MORE expensive ones!🙄).

[rathagrimes]

Hi Thai4Me, I used a Calibrite colorchecker studio to create an ICC profile but the printing is actually worse now and not better. You said you had trouble because of not "paying to attention to print the targets for the profile with NO ICC adjustments whatsoever" -- but I have been all over the print settings dialog trying to figure out how to disable color management on the printer side and I can't figure out what setting I'm missing. This also doesn't seem to be documented. I know it's been a few months since you posted but could you possibly share exactly what you tweaked in the settings to get your custom ICC to work? Thanks! -Ratha

[Thai4Me]

Hi rathagrimes,  From what program are you printing the targets for Calibrate colorchecker studio?  As I mentioned in my post, I did it from Lightroom Classic.

[rathagrimes]

Ah I didn't get what you meant by "targets" before but now it makes sense, and I got it working, thank you!

For others: First, it *is* documented how to disable native color management in the print driver, it is here: https://ij.manual.canon/ij/webmanual/PrinterDriver/W/G600%20series/1.0/EN/PPG/dg-c_color_correction0... -- buried in a dialog to set Color Correction to None.

Now, the key point is you have to disable this not just when printing with the new profile, but *also* when printing out the targets (swatches) in the process of building the profile in the first place. I was printing these using the software Calibrite provides for their device. I've found that software is quite easy to use but it doesn't inform you that you have to dig in the print settings and disable the printer's color management (by contrast, Photoshop's print dialog has a big warning with a yellow icon that says you need to do that).

[SergeB]

Would be nice if Canon just ship ICC profiles for the paper that G620 supports. Every other Canon printer I had always came with bunch of ICC profiles for the Canon paper. Come on Canon, what are you doing?