Printing/Color Management Problem

[suwalsh]

Hi
I have a pre-intel MacMini on OS 10.4. I have bought a Konica Minolta 2450 color laser printer. When printing from Quark 6.1, it's using the printer's color management to print and the colors are awful. I have called Konica's tech support 3 times (all say the you can't turn off the printer's color management -like you can for Espon printers) and during the third call the "mac expert" told me not to print composite cmyk, but to print composite rgb. That was bad advice since I import images from Photoshop and Illustrator with CMYK SWOP profiles.

When I go into Color Sync in Quark's print menu, "standard" is grayed out and that is what I should be able to use to bypass the printer's CM and use the host instead. I have loaded the latest PPD's from Konica's site and they are the same.

My question for a Mac person is...is there a way to go into Mac's ColorSync and somehow attach this PPD?

Or, after downloading their "download manager" can I grab a SWOP profile from one of my Adobe applications?

I'm very confused about the function of the PPD and the profiles...

Sue

 

[MisterMe]

The PPD [PostScript Page Description] file tells your PostScript print driver which features are available on your printer. These include the PostScript version, a list of available built-in fonts, supported paper sizes, color matching options, paper-handling options, applications-specific options, etc.

ColorSync ensures that the color of each pixel is the same at each step along your workflow. Your printer's ColorSync profile tells the OS how your printer creates each color. Each device--scanner, digital camera, monitor, printer, typesetter, etc.--has its own ColorSync profile. Manufacturers which support Macs usually supply profiles with their devices. For most applications, vendor-supplied profiles are more than adequate. For best results, however, users should calibrate their own workflows. Because devices change with age, they should be recalibrated periodically.