Today’s Question: Does allowing different Photoshop versions to control the printing with Epson printers produce different results?
Tim’s Quick Answer: In a general sense, no, different versions of Photoshop would not cause significant variations in the printed result. That said, there have been changes to the print engine in Photoshop over the years, which in particular have an impact on the specific settings available to you during the process of preparing a print.
More Detail: Photoshop has long supported established color management standards, which means each version enables you to employ a custom printer profile to produce an accurate print.
Of course, over the years there have been changes to the Print dialog as well as other features, causing changes to the specific workflow you need to use to produce an accurate print. Therefore, you need to pay attention to the specific settings being used when printing, to ensure you’re using the correct settings to produce the best print.
In addition, the settings available for the specific printer you’re using to produce the print can impact your workflow. For example, among different printer brands and even different printer models the dialog containing the printer settings is different, which can lead to confusion.
Whenever there is an update to the printer settings found in Photoshop, or there is a new configuration for the printer settings dialog, I invariably get a number of emails from photographers who are no longer getting accurate prints. The initial assumption is that the software update broke something. More often than not the actual issue is that the available settings (or default settings) changed with the software update, and configuring those settings correctly restores dependable printing.
So, while there have certainly some subtle changes over time in terms of how your image may be interpreted when printing, in general you will get consistent prints across various versions of Photoshop provided you are using the optimal print settings in each case.