Looking for printer profile for Canon ImagePress C850

[simsurace]

I have to prepare some photographs for printing a brochure. The photographs have a lot of blacks in them, so setting appropriate contrast is important to ensure a nice result.
Of course I could simply have the printer people make me a proof, and this will be done anyway. However, I think that it is more time-efficient to first do a softproof within Photoshop.
I need to have a profile of the printer, preferably for the sort of paper that will be used, in order to select it in the proofing setup of Photoshop.
This allows me to see how the colors and contrasts will appear on the paper, at least approximately.
I have done this numerous times before sending it to a printer for photographic prints. I have never been involved in printing a brochure before, though, so I might be confused about some of the differences between the two applications.

The problem is that I cannot find the profile, neither on Canon's site nor on the site of the paper producer. Can someone tell me where to find these sorts of profiles?
Or is this the sort of printer where profiles do not readily exist unless they are made by the printing house? (this might explain why they could not give me any profiles in the printing house either)

Printer: Canon ImagePress C850
Paper: Antalis Euroset bright white

[Ilkka Nissilä]

If the printer is intended for photography, then it is likely some profiles exist for the printer manufacurers papers. However, if it is not primarily a photo printer, then it is likely that colors are rather poorly reproduced and there may be no profiles.

For third party paper manufacturers, usually the paper manufacturer has some profiles for commonly used photo printers.

It is possible to generate profiles of your own by using appropriate calibration tools, but I have been satisfied with profiles supplied by the manufacturer, so I don't know the exact process for print calibration or which tools are best. You may check e.g. the xrite website.

[Akira]

Just checked out Canon's website.  The imagePress C850 is an on-demand printer for the professional use, and the workflow including the color management seems to be controlled in its dedicated software called imagePRESS Server.

Apparently the system is very different from the pre-set profile based photo printers popular among the photographers.

[CS]

I would recommend talking to whoever is doing the printing because I don't see any profile info on Canon's web pages or Antalis' either.

I've seen trains shorter than that printer! 

[simsurace]

Thanks for the hints.
No, this printer is definitely not a dedicated photo printer. But it is a big machine to print all kinds of things and I expect it to deliver color-accurate results, to the extent that is normally seen in brochures, catalogues, magazines, and normal books (e.g. textbooks with images).
It seems to be the case that the color management is done by the dedicated printer software, which does all the profiling and conversion.
I can ask them whether they profiled the printer themselves. In principle it could be that the same profiles that are being used by the dedicated software can be exported to be used in other software like Photoshop.
I guess the time for profiling the printer would be more than doing a few proofs, so it is not an option to ask them to profile the printer if they haven't already.
Otherwise it will be a guessing game and potentially a lot of work changing all the photos after they have already been implemented in the final layout.
We will see.

[CS]

Let us know how it all turns out for you, and whether or not you are able to have any input over the color.

[simsurace]

In the end it turned out that there are no profiles for this kind of printer.
At least that's what the printing house told me after talking to a person at Canon.
So I figured I have to make do without soft-proofing and made a test sheet with various levels of brightness to be printed out.
It turned out that the brightest sample was reproduced best, and the shadows were way too dark in the version that appeared good on the monitor.
The one that printed the best appears washed out on the monitor, and you can actually see some details in the black cloth that was used as a background.
However, on the paper the background is uniformly black.
This is where soft-proofing would save you a little bit of time, and as expected you cannot assume that without soft-proofing your monitor shows you the right level of black (I use a hardware calibrated monitor for this).
There was also a question of skin tones. The printing house gave me five different test sheets, printed with different "settings". The person that handed me the prints could not explain what the difference was. But it was clear that some were very bad quality, and the setting that gave the best blacks also had a very distinct green color cast that is unacceptable for the skin color rendition.

Let's now hope that nothing is messed up until the proof of the entire brochure is printed tomorrow.

[CS]

We'll keep our fingers crossed. Do they really expect people to oder printing with no idea about what the results will look like? OTOH, I'm far from what anyone would term as a printing guru, so what do I know?

[simsurace]

Apparently yes, in this case.
As far as I could see, they didn't even have color calibrated screens and a standard light source, so they would not be aware of any color shifts.
Before doing this project, I would have assumed that these things more or less belong to the set of minimal equipment that any printing company should have. Turned out I was wrong.
As far as I'm concerned, this was not the right house for color consistent printing.
But I did not choose this company myself, because this was part of a project with multiple people involved, and the person that did the layout and final assembly of the file chose the printer.

We needed three proofs to get the colors acceptable, which is not that bad, all things considered.
Most people would not notice anything wrong with the printed pictures without knowing what the originals looked like.