I'm doing print-to-file jobs in Qimage to send to a Fuji Frontier printer. These have been working out well. Normally I print a small-ish image on a larger page size to provide fairly wide white borders. For one test I decided to try using a medium-dark grey for the wide borders and picked R,G,B=55,55,55. This appears neutral within Qimage.

When I saved the file as a JPEG, then viewed it in IrfanView, the background had a slight but noticeable tint — a sort of "plum" color that I am not sure how else to describe. I thought: maybe it's just Irfanview, but when I had the print run on the Fuji printer, indeed the background was not a neutral color at all.

Later I noticed that soft proofing within Qimage also shows a slight shift toward that same color. Then I thought: this must be due to the output profile. (I use an output profile made by Dry Creek Photo for that particular printer.)

Some b&w shots that I prepared much the same way for the Fuji printer — using the same custom output profile — don't show much color shift as far as I can tell.

I don't expect to make prints with solid grey backgrounds like that very often. But if i were to do it again, how might I bring the background color back to a truly neutral value? Doing it via guesswork could take quite a while.

>> From what I gather, the problem is the profile. Profiles are made for printer, ink and most importantly, the paper. I have one printer, using only Canon ink, and I have 7 profiles for semi gloss, luster and glossy. I had these made because I had a ton of paper left from my Epson years. I had to have the profile for the paper.
Try switching the profile to LET PRINTER Driver Manage Color in Qimage That will place a neutral profile to be used. Switch the Driver setting from color management OFF to ICM.<<

Thanks.
So far I'm doing only print-to-file jobs in Qimage. Opening Page Setup/Properties in the main window, I can hit the "..." button to the right of Color Space and in the next (Color Management) dialog, click a Let Printer/Driver Manage Color button. I assume that's what you're referring to.

By doing this, I assume I would be disabling the custom Dry Creek Photo profile for this printer. I don't know what effect it would have on color rendering overall in the prints. I also wonder if changing the rendering intent would make a difference. Then again, I don't know if rendering intent will apply if I'm leaving the printer's own driver to handle the color management. Perhaps Relative Colorimetric would have been a better choice from the outset. (Rendering intents are a bit of a mystery to me.)

Or perhaps this unexpected color shift away from neutral grey is telling me I need to go to the trouble of sending a color-profiling target to this Fuji printer and then having my own custom profile made. In printing some b&w images that were "split-toned" in Capture One to this printer, I didn't see any unexpected color shift. But the prints with the supposedly neutral backgrounds certainly showed it...in the neutral areas.

Hmm...here's a possibly evil thought. What happens if you take a print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper (resin-coated, not fiber-based) and run it through a selenium toner bath? Probably nothing good. :-)

Thanks. I'll definitely give that a try. It's interesting seeing what a different black point compensation seems to make during soft proofing. I guess I'll have to try a couple of prints with it on and off not so much for color accuracy but to see how it affects the look of the print. These Fuji printers/papers must provide a pretty large gamut.

If I decided to have my own profile made for that Frontier printer, I would have to switch all color management off, I assume. (Been a while since I did that with an inkjet. I'm a bit hazy on the details now. I don't know if there are printer driver adjustments that have to be made but that would be out of my control with a commercial service's hardware.)

I suppose in that case I'm out of luck for trying to have my own profile made — I can't control what they do with their drivers as they run the high-volume machines. They do have a "no correction" option, which means they don't try to enhance customer images in any way, but I doubt it means they're switching off color management entirely. I suppose getting to the bottom of this calls for sundry permutations of how an image can be sent to them.

• sRGB vs AdobeRGB vs the Dry Creek profile
• Relative Colorimetric vs Perceptual
• Black point comp. on or off

The good news is, at least the prints are pretty inexpensive.