Media Types, Media Type Files, and ICC Profiles

Some clarification of media types, print settings, and ICC profiles in terms of print settings.

A “reject” from my Watercolors project. This was shot with a short tele… way more compression than all of my selects for that project — possibilities for a future project — as that compression causes may visuals to play differently? I chose this because it’s typically a limited color palette but more importantly looks way better prior to conversion to sRGB, mostly in the lower right quadrant that appears far richer in AdobeRGB and typical paper profiles.

If you print with any (remotely) recent Canon professional photo printer you’ve probably run into AM1X files somewhere. If you haven’t you may not have looked at your favorite paper manufacturers color management and ICC profiles in a long time. Since the release of the 100’s round of Canon printers (Pro 1100, Pro 2100, Pro 4100, etc). Many paper suppliers have either completed or are in the process of completing revising their ICC profiles for both the new printers and previous Canon models. These revised profiles are accompanied by the strange, new AM1X “media type” files.

Today I wanted to briefly discuss what these are, how they work, and how to use them in your workflow. I also wanted to point out a few quirks regarding how different paper manufacturers are implementing them. For simplicities sake, I’ll discuss them in the context of Adobe Lightroom Classic’s print module but the concepts should translate easily to whatever color managed software you use. There might even be a surprise to some of you that use the new Adobe Lightroom rather than Lightroom Classic.