Hello all you experts.
In the selections for printing to my Xerox 6120 color laser, there's a category labelled "Image RGB Intent" with choices of "Photographic, Vivid, Relative Color, Absolute Color."

Same choices are offered for "Text RGB Intent." I'm guessing that Photographic is self-explanatory. Vivid enhances some colors, maybe uses a rich black, as the term does on my inkjet printers.

WHAT ARE: Relative Color and Absolute Color?

Nothing in the printer documentation describes these terms.

Found these pages on the web. Looks highly technical - outside of my background. Would just be nice to know "what happens" with each choice (relative or absolute).

http://photo.bragit.com/whitePointRenderingIntent.html

http://www.brucelindbloom.com/

Mary Jo:

Probably the best option would be to print the same picture with the different options selected and look at the results to decide what "you" like best.

You should probably allow OS X to manage color, not applications, not cameras, not lens gizmos (Expodiscs), etc. That's what ColorSync is for, and higher quality instruments.

The other gizmos and tricks have their place, but also have a cost. Learn the highest quality color workflow, as well as the lower quality workflows, so you can choose the appropriate method.

Both of you make sense. Believe me, I prefer to keep things simple. If I just put the printer on "auto" the results are mixed, depending on images or graphics printed.

The various choices this printer offers really DO affect the quality of the print. - Brian, yes I've done a fair amount of trying them out.

Another example of choices: "Image RGB Source" defaults to sRGB. Other choices are "None" [would this let OSX handle color], "Adobe RGB 1998,"Apple RGB" [maybe THIS one is OSX - ?], "ColorMatch RGB," [I think this is a standard formula, as Pantone is a standard formula for CMYK] "Blue Adjust RGB"

And we're just getting started with the choices.
- Won't go into them all, but should mention the "Simulation Profile" choices: None, SWOP [web press, I think], Euroscale, Commercial Press, DIC, TOYO.

Don't expect you folks to solve all of this, but trying ALL the possible combinations of variables would be daunting.

Based on my various tryouts, I have made several custom settings that use Adobe RGB and/or Commercial Press and/or SWOP, as these seem to have the most pronounced effect on results.

Just wondered what the "relative" and "absolute" color mean. Am guessing (based on a very hasty scan of the web pages above) that one application of "absolute" would be a Pantone color & its formula of CMYK.

You're asking about rendering intents.

You may want to read this: Rendering Intents.

Bruce Fraser is correct on this point (though not on all points he writes about):

quote:

Choosing the correct rendering intent for the job at hand is one of the essential tasks in making color management work. Look at the relative gamuts of your source and destination: The same image may need different rendering intents for different output process. For example, an image might benefit from perceptual rendering when printed to an inkjet printer, but when the same image is going out to the much larger gamut of a film recorder, relative colorimetric rendering might work much better. If an image doesn't contain any important strongly saturated colors, you'll probably get a better result using relative colorimetric rendering than you would using perceptual.

Rendering intents are simply tools. It's up to you to use them. If you take the trouble to understand what they do and then use them wisely, you'll produce better color than if you simply accept the default settings of this or that application.

Most photographers choose either relative colorimetric or perceptual.

For high-end color management, you should be avoiding all color management in the printer, and use PhotoShop or another "ColorSync-aware" application that uses ColorSync. Embed color profiles in the source image. Profile your Tektronix printer. Profile your display. If you don't do these things, you're just shooting in the dark like Peter Sellers (or shooting from the hip like John Wayne). Your process is out-of-control. If you don't want to do all this stuff, do as Brian said: play around until you find a combination that suits your taste. However, it will probably only suit your taste for one photograph - the next photo would very likely cause you to start testing settings all over again (thus wasting time, money, paper, and ink).

Your Tektronix printer has a narrow color gamut, so it will not reproduce the more brilliant colors of a consumer inkjet printer using "archival" (pigmented) inks.