Converting Spyderprint 225 patch target to i1Profiler

pharmacist

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Having read the Spyderprint 225 high quality target should produce nice profiles, I decided to make a custom profile based on the Spyderprint 225 patch high quality target:

High Quality Target.jpg


This profile is based on RGB: 5x5x5=125 steps + extra near neutral patches + some grey patches up to 225 patches. I think the trick of the good results of this target, despite its limited patch count (only 225), is thanks of the large amount of near neutral patches, so the grey axis is much better estimated using a limited amount of patch sampling, resulting in very good profiles despit the limited patch count.

Because the i1Pro2 is superior to the Spyderprint device, I decided to make a similar target for the i1Pro2 for th i1Profiler software using a base 131 patch base target of which the last 6 patches I removed from the file using the patch editor function in i1Profiler:

1742653599777.png


The last 6 patches has been removed in the patch editor function of i1Profiler and using the Photoshop function to determine the exact RGB-value of the Spyderprint high quality target of the additional colours I added the extra 100 patches of the Spyderprint target to this custom 225 patch i1Profiler target and this is the result of the target:

Spyderprint 225 patch high quality target 10x15 cm.jpg


The whole target can be printed an small 10x15 cm photo card enabling profiling using only a small piece of photo paper, I printed the test target using this limited 225 patch count target and a much larger 918 patch target (based on the TC9.18 printer target) and this is the result:

IMG_20250322_150036.jpg

I can see hardly any difference and the result is identical to me, including the dark shadows (no lost of details).
 

crenedecotret

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Having read the Spyderprint 225 high quality target should produce nice profiles, I decided to make a custom profile based on the Spyderprint 225 patch high quality target:

View attachment 16956

This profile is based on RGB: 5x5x5=125 steps + extra near neutral patches + some grey patches up to 225 patches. I think the trick of the good results of this target, despite its limited patch count (only 225), is thanks of the large amount of near neutral patches, so the grey axis is much better estimated using a limited amount of patch sampling, resulting in very good profiles despit the limited patch count.

Because the i1Pro2 is superior to the Spyderprint device, I decided to make a similar target for the i1Pro2 for th i1Profiler software using a base 131 patch base target of which the last 6 patches I removed from the file using the patch editor function in i1Profiler:

View attachment 16957

The last 6 patches has been removed in the patch editor function of i1Profiler and using the Photoshop function to determine the exact RGB-value of the Spyderprint high quality target of the additional colours I added the extra 100 patches of the Spyderprint target to this custom 225 patch i1Profiler target and this is the result of the target:

View attachment 16958

The whole target can be printed an small 10x15 cm photo card enabling profiling using only a small piece of photo paper, I printed the test target using this limited 225 patch count target and a much larger 918 patch target (based on the TC9.18 printer target) and this is the result:

View attachment 16959
I can see hardly any difference and the result is identical to me, including the dark shadows (no lost of details).
This is pretty interesting! I have both a colormunki and an old spyderprint. I was considering trying to convert the values from the Spyder test chart for ti1/ti2 files for argyllcms

My reasoning is that the Spyder hardware is reportedly not that bad. I always wanted to try to find a way to feed the data into argyllcms in case my colormunki every breaks down.

How did you extract all the rgb values? By hand in something like Photoshop?
 

pharmacist

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When combining the Spyderprint 255 patch high quality target + gray ramp target, you get this in i1Profiler:

Spyderprint high quality target + grays.jpg


I think the sampling of measurement points around the grey and neutral axis is pretty high now, which should very good black and white printing using this target.
 

Dr_Nick

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This is pretty interesting! I have both a colormunki and an old spyderprint. I was considering trying to convert the values from the Spyder test chart for ti1/ti2 files for argyllcms

My reasoning is that the Spyder hardware is reportedly not that bad. I always wanted to try to find a way to feed the data into argyllcms in case my colormunki every breaks down.

How did you extract all the rgb values? By hand in something like Photoshop?
That's actually something I did a while ago. You can use Spyder Print with argyll but it requires some messing around with files.

You can start with any ti1/ti2 files you like. @pharmacist 's 480 patch target, for instance, happens to be quite suitable for the spyder Print. What you suggest (converting spyder print targets to ti1/ti2) could also be a good starting point.

The Spyder Print software allows spot measurements and it can write the L*a*b values to simple text files. Then you copy those values into a .ti3 file generated by argylls fakeread command and with this .ti3 file you generate your icc profile as usual. However, this is quite a tedious process because you cannot use the strip reading mode of the instrument (you are limited to spot readings), you need to make sure that all measurements are in the right order and you need to be careful when doing the text editing operations. It should be possible to write a script to make at least the text editing / file conversion operations easier.

That being said, the resulting profiles are in my experience very similar to those created with a color Munki device which I also own. Which suggests that the Spyder Print device is actually not as bad as commonly suggested. IMHO, the poor results often reported are much more due to Datacolor's software than to the device itself.
 

pharmacist

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I just produced a target using the above combined high quality target + grays (from the Spyderprint target) and used i1profiler to produce the profile. The result is indeed very good: a nice rounded target without any indentation or strange curvings:

1742902128568.png


1742902159856.png


1742902190622.png
 

crenedecotret

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Attached is an ArgyllCMS version of the spyderprint 225 patch chart.

To do this, I pulled all the RGB values from the original chart and ran them through xicclu to get xyz values. These are needed to have a rough idea of what the expected result is when read back with chart read. I then used this command in printtarg to get the exact 15x15 layout as the spiderprint grid and also disable the randomizing of patches. Some experimenting may be needed for A4 paper
printtarg -v -r -ii1 -a1.4 -T300 -p Letter SpyderChart_Replica

Because argyllcms charts dosen't support custom patch sizes, I had to use an existing format. With my chart, row A read from top to bottom corresponds to line 1 in the original datacolor chart. B corresponds to line 2, etc. Technically you would be able print out my TIF file and read with a colormunk or i1 in argyllcms or with the spyderprint, one patch at a time. Here is the original chart next to mine. I flipped and rotated the original target to help understand the layout but with the original rotation, if you compare ArgyllCMS "B2" to datacolor "2B", you will see that the RGB values are identical.

I still need to do some experimenting
1. I want to run a profile with my custom ti1/ti2 files with my colormunki to see how good or bad the profile is with the 225 patches
2. I want to try and read this chart with the Spyder and then create a profile to compare with the argyllcms one.
3. I'll need to read in the original spyder chart with the datacolor software and then try to export the results to use in colprof. It might be possible to do with something like this
chartread –xl spyderchart_replica < spyder-export.txt

I've attached the tiff and ti1/ti2 files if anyone wants to give this a try


Howtouse.png
 
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crenedecotret

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My apologies.. Patch #223 was incorrect. I mistyped some information while creating my reference files
The attached files are correct

Perhaps someone with an older spyderprint will be able to get some use out of it. I got mine for 25$ CDN on ebay as a backup device

Howtouse_v2.png
 

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  • SpyderChart_Replica_fix.zip
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crenedecotret

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No prints done yet but the profiling seems to work from Spyderprint to argyll. Here are the steps
1. Export your spyderprint measurements to LAB. I used a very old measurement file.
2. Use Notepad++ to replace all tabs by spaces or argyllcms will not accept the input
3. add a "d" and a linefeed at the end of the file and then save
4. chartread -p -S -v2 -xl SpyderChart_Replica < Spider.txt | more
adding | more here is important as there seems to be a bug in argyllcms. Without it, Argyll will not accept any of the values in the txt file. The "d" we added at the end will instruct chartread to exit and save the TI3 file. I never figured out why. I was just using "more" to see error and it worked. You'll need to press the space bar for each displayed page and "q" when you see "all patches read"
5. run colprof like you usually do. for a quick test, I used
colprof -v -qh Spyderchart_replica

The result is interesting. Using the same data, Argyllcms has more gamut volume. The colored profile is from spyderprint and was terrible. Argyllcms in wireframe

Not too many errors using colprof
There is 1 rev cache instance with 657 Mbytes limit
Profile check complete, peak err = 2.055743, avg err = 0.440776, RMS = 0.553400

The softproof looks fine. If anything the "paper color" in photoshop looks closer to reality vs an argyllcms profile on the same paper done with my colormunki

I'll run an actual print tomorrow to compare

gamut-result.png
 

crenedecotret

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To finish off the evening, here is my currently used profile for the same paper, done with argyllcms and my colormunki. I'm not 100% sure but I think the datacolor device might be dealing with OBAs a little better. The softproof on my munki profile has a tinge of yellow as the paper color but the datacolor/argyllcms profile does not show this. Gamut is almost identical
munki vs spyder.png
 
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