Printing to High-Quality Printers

When you print from Photoshop to an ink-jet printer, be very clear about where the color conversion is taking place. Color conversion can take place in Photoshop or via the printer driver. In most cases, you will want to control this conversion through Photoshop by using either paper-specific profiles or your own custom color profiles. The more specific the color profile is to your printing device and paper, the higher quality and more consistent your results will be.
Printer drivers will typically be using more-generic color profiles than the paper-specific profiles you can obtain, or the custom profiles you can create by using your own color management software.

If you are printing to an ink-jet printer as a final output device, you will likely be printing an RGB color space image with its conversion to an expanded gamut color space of cyan, magenta, yellow, light cyan, light magenta, and perhaps a choice of several black inks occurring through the printer driver. If, on the other hand, you are using your ink-jet printer as a proofing device for a commercial printing press, your printer will likely be fitted with a RIP specifically designed for this purpose, to which you will be sending images you have already converted to C, M, Y, and K process colors. So be very clear about your final output device and where your gamut conversion is occurring.