Today I made my first print with the 7900 and the new combination of software. I optimized my photo in the usual way; with the exception of the new (and very interesting) process version in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), that being PV2012, there's little change to my workflow with CS6. I've read from several sources that soft proofing has been improved in CS6; that may be true, but I'll need to work more with that before I can say for sure. In any case, getting ready to print is straightforward.
However, the print dialog is new, and different in several ways. I was surprised at the new layout of the print dialog. Having never seen the Windows version of this, I'm not sure how different the Mac version is. In the previous version with CS5, a full-height right pane contained the color set-up options. To the left of that another pane had sizing, quantity, scale, and a few other options. Those two panes filled roughly half of the big dialog box. The preview pane filled the left half.
Now, all of the old set-up options (and more) are in a single, scrolling pane on the right, while the preview remains on the left. Here's the good part: the preview is surrounded by a white border, and that has edges with slash marks. By default a black background surrounds the preview. While there may be some good reasons for that black border, I thought it made the preview image appear very bright, and I didn't care for the contrast with the settings pane on the right. I discovered right-clicking in that black border exposes a menu with some gray shades and a "custom" option to set any color. I chose the darker gray. Click the image below for a larger view.
The white around the image is the print area. The slash marks, representing the unprintable area, show the edges of the full sheet. I think this is excellent. After making the print and comparing, I found this representation of the print position on the sheet to be quite accurate. You can see the total bottom border is significantly wider than the top, despite the "Center" option being checked. But it shows exactly what I'm going to get, which is a nice improvement over CS5.
In my early days working with the 7900 and its driver, I ranted here several times about the difficulty centering images on cut sheets. Look back at postings in late October through mid-November, 2011, for details. This new preview doesn't fix the centering problem (that is, checking the "Center" box in the Position frame of the dialog does NOT center the image on the sheet), but it does, finally, provide a good approximation of where on the sheet the image will be printed. This means the top margin can be adjusted so the image in the preview looks centered, and clipping of the image can be avoided. Nice!
Apparently, this is all Adobe's doing. As a test, I installed the latest 7900 driver on my MacBook Pro 15" laptop. This has OS X 10.8.2, but still has the older Photoshop CS5. The print dialog is exactly as it appeared on the Mac Pro with CS5 and the older OS, confirming the change is the result of the Photoshop upgrade to CS6.
--Jay
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