Printing in Adobe RGB colour space on a Canon Pixma Pro 100s

[Roberto Smith]

Okay this is probably going to be a fairly long post so bear with me (I'll to a tl,dr at the end )

So as a side hobby / business I make custom stickers for Lego sets. I design them using Inkscape, export the images as .png and then import them into a package called Sure Cuts A Lot (SCAL for short). SCAL is used for laying out the stickers but most importantly is the key software connected to my vinyl cutting machine, so I can pre-cut the stickers. I can't just print from Inkscape as the SCAL software controls the cut lines and also has to print the registration marks, which are L-shaped guides in the top left, top right, bottom left and bottom right of the page. The vinyl cutter scans these so it know's where it's supposed to be cutting.

One issue I noticed is that it's hard to get the primary colours of the stickers to match the Lego bricks. Blue is particularly troublesome, then green, red maybe not so bad but not perfect. At first I thought the printer just couldn't print in a wide enough gamut but then I decided to have a custom ICC profile made. As part of the process the company making the profile sent me an app that forces the printer to create a large colour matrix - basically printing out its entire gamut (in steps) so they can use a machine to scan the colour matrix and make the ICC profile for the printer / paper combo I'm using.

On printing out the colour matrix, this is when I first noticed that the colours I'm looking for are actually achievable by the printer and the app. the company had sent me had actually got the printer to create the much more saturated blues, greens and reds I was after.

I then got the ICC profile but even with that controlling the colour, I still can't get the SCAL (vinyl cutting software) to create the colours I need. The problem is that it just doesn't have any colour management options so it just goes through the printer driver. Either that or it's just using the sRGB range so the gamut is pretty limited?

Again I was going to give up but I was tinkering around in Adobe Illustrator (free month long trial) and noticed that I can get much more saturated colours if I switch to the Adobe RGB colour space. On printing these out they were much closer to the blue, green and red colours on the actual Lego bricks.

Next step, I figured out I can export the to-be-printed sticker sheet from SCAL (vinyl cutting software) as a pdf file (including the all important registration marks needed by the vinyl cutter), import this into Illustrator and switch the colour space to Adobe RGB. Once printed on vinyl sticker paper, this then gives the colours I need. HOWEVER - I don't want to pay £25 a month for Illustrator just to print the occasional sticker sheet just to get better colours.

I only have the free version of Adobe reader and that also seems to have no way to select a different colour space to print with.

My question therefore is: I have a pdf file that I want to print in the Adobe RGB colour space - is there a way doing this without having to buy a subscription to a program such as Illustrator? Is there a way to print from Adobe reader? Is there a way to "force" my printer to print using Adobe RGB colour space?

tl,dr I want to force my Canon Pixma Pro to print more saturated colours and printing using Adobe RGB colour space seems to work, but I want a method that is free or cheap compared to a monthly subscription to an Adobe app that can do this e.g. Illustrator

 

[The Ninth]

A few comments:

If you want to fully make use of the gamut of your printer, you should prepare your files in ProPhoto RGB instead of Adobe RGB. Current inkjet printers already exceed Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto is a larger space that can accommodate the whole gamut of your printer.

An inexpensive alternative to Adobe Illustrator/InDesign is Affinity Designer/Publisher. You just pay a one-time fee of 55 Euro for each of the two tools. I have been using Affinity Publisher for book printing for some time now, and it works quite well, including its support for color management and printing photos in the ProPhoto color space.

For Acrobat Reader, as far as I know it does support color management at least for display, i.e. it will honor any color space information embedded into the PDF. You would have to test if it does the same for printing, if you use the printer drivers color management. Open your file in Acrobat Reader, go for printing, choose the printer, select Properties, activate the "Color/Intensity Manual Adjustment" and in the window that then opens go for the "Matching" tab and select "ICC Profile Matching" and under "Printer Profile" select the ICC profile you want to print with. Now print and see if you get the desired result.

 

[Artur5]

Current inkjet printers exceed AdobeRGB ?.. In my experience with the printers that I owned, they can, with some papers exceed very slightly AdobeRGB space in small areas of cyan and yellow-orange but on the other parts of the spectrum, the gamut of the AdobeRGB color space stretches far away the possibilities of my poor Canon Pro10s. In some areas, this printer doesn't even covers the whole sRGB space.
To practical effects, I see no real advantage using ProPhotRGB over AdobeRGB, if printing is your ultimate goal.
That said, using ProPhotoRGB won't hurt either. You can always convert to a narrower color space ,but the inverse isn't possible without losing gamut.

 

[The Ninth]

Of course you could call it marginal gains, but if you already run a color-managed workflow and edit in a color space larger than sRGB, why not go for ProPhoto RGB instead of AdobeRGB. Especially so in this case, when the topic starter is trying to push saturation to its very limit.

Here I posted some gamut graphs showing where a PRO-1000 on Hahnemühle paper exceeds Adobe RGB. I do think it is notable, but of course cannot be sure if the topic starters stickers have a similarily large gamut.

https://www.the-ninth.com/blog/prophoto-for-image-editing