By Marc Aguilera

In April, I attended the San Francisco stop on the PDN On The Road seminar tour associated with Santa Fe Workshops. Speakers discussed topics ranging from digital transitions and technology to best practices in commercial, editorial, and wedding photography.

I was there representing HP. During breaks between the sessions, we showed the 24-in. Designjet Z3100 and the Photosmart Pro B9180 printers. I found it interesting to hear the comments from the photographers who stopped by to check out the new printers.

Although most comments related to the costs of the printers and the fade-resistance of the inks, many photographers keep talking about the “user experience” in the printing process. Photographers want an easy pathway to beautiful prints. This means the entire process of printing needs to be easy and straightforward with minimal waste.

There was lots of discussion about how other manufacturers have complicated the digital printing process. Most of the complexity comes from driver properties and settings. Photographers are confused over settings for a proper color-managed workflow.

In the Designjet Z, HP has taken steps to give users a more trouble-free experience and eliminate the pilot error of choosing the wrong settings for a color-managed workflow. Using Mac OS 10.4, you can synchronize the color settings in the Adobe Photoshop CS2/CS3 Print with Preview dialog with the color settings in the Designjet Z printer driver. As shown in Figure 1, if you have an image that you want to “Print with Preview” using "Let Photoshop Determine Colors," you simply select the printer profile and rendering intent. This is called Application-Managed Color Management.


Figure 1

Once you move onto the settings for the print driver, a synchronization occurs that automatically selects the appropriate setting. This is known as Application Managed Colors (Figure 2).



Figure 2

HP has eliminated another common cause of errors by synchronizing the Z2100/Z3100 driver to alert you if the paper type you have loaded is different from the paper type that has been chosen in the settings (Figure 3).  All these improvements contribute to a straightforward, color-managed workflow that is easy to use.


Figure 3

You can learn more about easier-to-manage photo printing, and other new developments in the world of photography, when the PDN On The Road seminar comes to a major US city in your area.