Although not on the radar of most Photoshop users the absence of the No Colour Management option within the Photoshop CS5 print dialog caused significant consternation amongst those who create their own ICC profiles for printing. Unfortunately, the removal of this feature wasn’t something that Adobe wanted to do, but rather a necessity for compatibility with the most recent operating systems from both Microsoft and Apple. That being said, without this option printing the multi-coloured patch targets used for determining a printers colour handling characteristics is extremely difficult. Hence the screams of foul.

To address this omission and no doubt pacify those of us who build our own printer profiles Adobe have created the Adobe Color Print Utility, which is a simple application designed solely to enable printing without color management.

Using the utility couldn’t be simpler. First, open the appropriate target image (File>Open).

Print Testchart Loaded in Adobe Colour Printing Utility

Once the target is loaded choose Page Setup to configure the appropriate printer and paper size. Next, choose Print to set the printer driver to the correct media and print quality, turn the printer colour management off (i.e. No Color Adjustment). Finally, hit Print button.

Set Printer Driver Color Settings to Off (No Color Adjustment)

The target will likely print somewhat darker than the on-screen version and some of the colours of some patches will very probably have a fair amount of hue shift and increased saturation, but that’s what’s meant to happen. Once the print is dry it can be measured using an instrument such as the X-rite i1 spectrophotometer.

More information on the new utility and guidance on its use can be found in an Adobe Knowledge Base article. The utility can also be downloaded from the the Adobe KB page.