Poor Results With Custom Printer Profiles on Mac
Prints look bad on Mac OS X 10.13.6 High Sierra and later with profiles that have worked fine in the past. We’ve seen some strange things happening on Mac OS X High Sierra 10.13.6 and higher. In particular, printer drivers have been getting corrupted. We had a customer discover this about a year ago. Soft proofing looked fine but when he printed with a custom-built profile, there was a strong color shift. These poor results are happening with profiles that previously worked perfectly, as well as brand new profiles. He had to reset his printing system to completely delete printer and then reinstalled the printer. His reply to me is below:“Thank you very much for your efforts. After much testing (and trying different things) I found the following resolution. Since you went above & beyond in helping me, I have included this information in case other customers run into the same problem. As previously discussed, I am using a 2017 Mac Pro system running 10.15.6. All components of my system (monitor, printers, scanners, photography camera, etc.) are color profiled/corrected.
1. The issue is a “buggy” Epson driver (version 10.16 for Epson SC-P800 printer).
2. Epson support was not much help (they simply stated that they have had issues with this driver and I should simply re-install it).
3. The driver appears to lose its reference to all ICC profiles (Epson, X-Rite created, system, etc.), therefore the image is printed without any color correction. In addition, the Epson ICC profiles “disappear” from the system.
4. The problem occurs when restoring the OS using Apple Time Machine or when making certain system changes. I have not tested it with Carbon Copy backups.
5. Repairing profiles with the ColorSync utility does not resolve the issue.
6. How the driver is re-installed is critical for successful resolution.
My testing determined the following:
1. The OS printing system must first be formally reset using System Preferences > Printers & Scanners > (right mouse click) “Reset printing system”. This SYSTEM RESET is one of the CRITICAL steps. With my setup, if the driver is simply re-installed without this step, the problem will not be corrected. Of course, this step also deletes all the other printers as well.
2. The printers are then re-installed from the System Preferences > Printers & Scanners screen
3. Select “+” to add the printer, select the desired printer, and use “Epson SC-P800 Series” rather than AirPrint. Re-downloading the driver and formally re-installing it is NOT INDICATED as the underlying files are still present from the original installation (assuming AirPrint was not used for the original installation). Other deleted printers are also reinstalled in the same fashion.
4. The reset (and now “back to default”) preference files for things such as custom papers or custom printer settings (i.e. the user level “com.apple.print.xxx.plist” files) are restored from backups. Simply doing this without the preceding steps also does not correct the issue with my system.
I have now re-created and “repaired” this issue 3 times in testing, with each test successfully resolving the issue in a consistent fashion. Of course, there may be other ways to resolve the issue, but I do not plan to go any further as I have found a consistently successful method.”
This has been sent this to a number of end users. A couple have reported that simply deleting the poorly behaved printer (some have been Epson and some Canon) and then reinstalled it by pressing the “+” sign to add it back. Another end user reported that he had to reset his printing system and added the printer back…he still had the issue so he reset the printing system a second time and then added the printer again…and then the prints were back to normal.
