Winning the war against Double Management (part 1)

One of the dreaded terms often heard between tech's and artists alike is double management. While a good RIP software (or CS3 or a good printer plugin) will eliminate this problem, I figure I'll add my two cents before it becomes an obsolete issue. For all of us not lucky enough to afford a RIP or CS3, which has been me in the past, here we go...

There are just too many places where you can select the same options for your prints. Depending on your printer manufacture/model, I count up to four. Yes, four. (I assume Photoshop CS2 or below for the rest of the article) For starters, there is the Print Preview and associated Page Setup. When you select your printer in Page Setup, it will give you the nice "preferences" button next to it. Click on that and you'll be brought to a place to select seemingly identical info. Don't think that choosing the correct settings here will let you neglect to set the preference from the actual "PRINT" dialog box. Once you have all your settings correct up through the PAGE SETUP>>PRINT PREVIEW, we are brought to the actual PRINT dialog.

Now in Print, you will see the list of printers as well as the preferences button again. Depending on how well your computer runs/what you've done since Print Preview, some of the settings may have decided to change back to their default. This ruins prints quite quickly.

The fourth place for some of us is on the LCD display of the actual printer. Some, such as Canon's iPF series, prompt you for information such as the media type and media size. One more place to double manage/make a mistake. One advantage of CS3 is that it will merge the past 3 dialog boxes together to a single screen, making it about three times easier to print with the correct settings...

(Continued Tomorrow)