Managing Your Print Environment
Managing Your Print Environment
Prevention and resolution of print problems
Les and I have hosted print-related workshops for well over a decade. Most of you probably are not forced to upgrade the software critical to making prints as we are. Most of the people that attend our workshops use Adobe “Creative Cloud” and allow updates to occur as Adobe pushes them out. We do not allow automatic updating and you should probably think about turning auto-updates off as well.
A day or two before a workshop we must update all of our Adobe software to the latest version. If we don’t our print workstations cannot read attendees' Lightroom libraries exported with the latest software from their computers. If we were not hosting workshops we’d update far less frequently than we do. Even with our circumstances, we manage our print environment carefully in terms of changes. A reader asked for general advice based on our February wrap-up, so here’s an overview of how we manage our environment. What follows is guided more or less by the scientific method.
Establish A Baseline
The first thing to consider is establishing a baseline that you can use to verify the state of your printing environment. You need a few known good prints. Make sure those good prints represent a broad spectrum of color. Cover as many bases as you can from dark to light, a good representation of hues, and various saturations. This may be more important than you’d think. More than once we thought we had a sound environment after updates and changes but there was a huge problem with one specific set of blue-green hues that manifested itself in horrific ways with every print that had those colors. Include a dead-neutral black and white.
The baseline you use to test includes:
The same paper
Known good ICC profile
Prints with a wide representation of all hues, saturations, and brightness
A neutral black-and-white print
After changes or updates make comparison prints as soon as possible. Know which particular change caused an issue rather than detecting it down the road after multiple changes. It is far easier to undo or roll back one change than having no idea and a few months of updates and having no choice but to go forward and hope for the best.
Update And Change On Your Terms
If you are fortunate enough to have more than one computer update one and test it before moving on to the other. For us, this is a must and it’s especially important in times of tumultuous changes such as a major OS update that impacts print drivers, Adobe changes, etc. We typically do not update major versions of the OS until a few months after release. Major releases would be Mac OS 12 to 13 or Windows 10 to Windows 11. Delaying those kinds of updates allows printer drivers, Adobe, and other software to sort out all the problems.
As mentioned previously we don’t allow Adobe to update Lightroom, Photoshop, or anything else we use to print automatically. We decide when we have time to update, test, and resolve problems. If we are not forced to go forward due to a workshop, we roll back the Adobe update. It’s not hard there are instructions that are easy to follow right through the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop. When Lightroom is updated it makes a copy of your old library upon opening with the new version. That caveat is testing your print environment before doing a lot of work in the new library.
We’ve extended this policy to minor OS updates as well as printer driver updates due to quirks in our particular combination of printers and software. We’ve taken on a policy of “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it”. Of course, this is tempered by the fact that updates are fixing other things unrelated to printing. We just plan it instead of letting all of the vendors dictate the velocity of change. In our case it’s fine to run an older version of the OS and printer drivers, it is only the version of Lightroom that needs to change to support workshop attendees.
Maintain Alternate Printing Software
I can say that the biggest source of printing problems we’ve encountered over the last 5 or 10 years are software updates rather than hardware issues. Of those software problems, the vast majority of those have been Adobe problems that eventually get fixed within one or two Creative Cloud updates. Some of those updates are fairly quick, within a week or two. Sometimes it is a month or more.
We have multiple software choices outside of Adobe that can produce a good print. You probably have similar choices. We use Capture One in addition to Adobe software. It’s not got all the convenience features of the Lightroom print module but we can use it to produce a good print. We also have Canon’s free print software. We use either or both of these to confirm the source of the problem is Adobe software. Consider maintaining software than can make good prints in your environment as well. There are plenty of alternatives no matter what printer you use, the key is to be comfortable and confident with those before you have a problem.
Feel free to share your own thoughts on managing your print environment or ask specifics related to your circumstances. If Les or I can’t answer there’s a good chance someone else in the community has something to offer.
We are on the same page. I never do auto-updates or make other software changers without a good reason. The rest of what you said is exactly correct. What it boils down to is this: If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
The other side of that is eventually you have to do a lot of updates all at once which is really difficult to manage. Also Adobe has, while occasionally breaking things, added lots of useful features which I would hate to miss. My strategy is to develop skills with alternative tools so when one breaks (usually at the worst possible time) I can quickly use the alternate. E.g. for printing I use Lightroom and Canons Pro Print and Layout alternately. I’m also learning Qimage. For developing Lightroom and Photoshop use the same Raw processing tools. Although that’s a single point of failure so I also use Skylum NEO. This works for me because I love the digital darkroom and exploring the possibilities. For those who love the other elements more - capture and print, I completely understand that complicating the workflow is a headache.