perhaps I should have said the OS is insensitive to applications. If I print a photo in Photoshop and then a document in Mail, of course I have to change the settings in Mail. But then going back to Photoshop I still have my settings from Mail. The print dialogue does not know where it is.

Now you can say this is not the fault of the OS and the app is responsible for printing, but because media selection in handled by the OS, (and sometimes colour) you are tripped up every time. What is great about Lr is that it remembers both the OS media settings and its own settings in its presets. I can’t say that for any other app.

I’m sure Epson, HP and Canon bear some responsibility here to…their print drivers are all overly complicated to one degree or another.

I stumbled across this post in a search for LR v Aperture comparisons, and. though the post is 2 years old, I really do feel the need to make a point here: I was one of the lead architects on Mac OS X printing, and I can tell you that remembering print settings is, and always has been, up to the application. Some do it better than others, but if your app doesn’t remember print settings from one print command to the other, that’s not Mac OS X’s fault: it’s the app.

The OS X printing APIs have always supported saving and recalling previous print settings. In fact, they provide far more capability in this area than was ever possible under pre-X versions of Mac OS. But printing is a complex task, and that portion of an application’s development is often left until the very end; the result is that many apps don’t do as good a job as they should.

Congratulations to Lightroom for doing it correctly. Other apps do as well.