Epson R1900 or Canon Pro9000MKII to refill with Precision Colors Inks?

[twinkle]

mikling,

What are your plans for selling Klariah? I don't see it on your website.

It is simply mix of Precision Colors K4 pigments in certain proportions to eliminate color cast that is apparent when using K4 directly or is there more to it?

 

[mikling]

I will have it up next week. It is a mix of various colors of pigments for the Claria based machines.

I am working on some HTML as I am redoing my website which will now be geared towards not only the Home Office crowd but also for those who want to step up to the next level of high performance printing while still maintaining an austerity budget....the serious photographer on a limited budget.

 

[mikling]

Now onto why softproofing is important to understand.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/soft-proofing.shtml



And you really need to understand this one from pixel genius.. a really good site.


http://www.pixelgenius.com/tips/fraser-softproofing.pdf

it is important for those searching for the holy grail. Take a good look at the examples.

For those who don't know Bruce Fraser, he was also a co author of Real World Color Management.... a reference of sorts on this topic.

In only the second paragraph of this document, it says "the naive view of color management is that it will make your prints match your monitor. ...you've probably realized that is an impossible goal"

Well it took me a while to figure it out.... I should have found this article a long time ago. Well that is what learning is all about.

 

[leo8088]

It should take little time to understand that soft proofing is not to make the printer to print the colors shown on your monitor. It is the opposite. It makes the monitor to display the colors your printer will print. If you have a bad set of ink and you have a correct profile for it, or if you make a bad profile for a good set of ink soft proofing will make no improvement to the colors of the print. In either case the colors printed by the printer will be poor. Soft proofing will make your monitor to display the same poor colors the printer prints. No improvement is gained by soft proofing alone.

For example, I have a chrome silde of a Fuji Velvia RVP-50, which was the emulsion that dominated the images on National Geographic magazine in the 70's and probably early 80's. I may get a drum scan on Adobe RGB color space. The image will look fabulous on a high quality multimedia display with true fabulous colors. Now if I got this wimpy Canon Pro9000 with a set of cheap Chinese ink set it will not print the colors I see on my monitor, not even close. Even I use OEM ink it is not going to print the same colors seen on the monitor either.

So I make a profile for the cheap ink and I use soft proofing technique to make the monitor to display exactly the colors the printer will print with the cheap ink and the profile I made. The result is the colors the printer prints will be still the same, regardless the monitor displays differently before applying soft proofing or identically with soft proofing. Nothing is different. The only difference is the colors on the display will be close or identical to the print.

Chances are that the colors will be still different. Something is still wrong You will have a hack of good time trying to figure out why they are still different. The bottom line is if the ink is a set of bad ink or if the profile is poorly made for a good set of ink the colors in either case are supposed to be not great. Soft proofing will make it even worse if it is not done right and the colors between the monitor and the print don't match.

Will soft proofing make my printer print the fabulous colors on my slide? Soft proofing is not the answer to my quest of search for a solution to make my printer to print better. The answer is in finding a set of wide gamut ink and better tool to make a fabulous profile. Soft proofing does nothing to this.

 

[lolopr1]

I just did a search of www.photo.net at its digital camera and digital darkroom forums. I found no mentioning of softproofing by anyone. I don't know why. I thought I could find more about softproofing there. I tried not to look at vendor's sites which may be full of marketing words. I specifically look for discussions and learn from people who actually have done it successfully. I found very little information. Where should I look instead?

I try to understand your point in this thing of soft proofing the more I tried I still dont get it, in your previous post you said that soft proofing dosent work for you but at the same time you insist to bring the issue and it's starting to look like you are just trying to make others look bad. There is a simple answer to your question, if it dosent fit you needs you don't have to use it.

 

[leo8088]

Soft proofing is a technique to make your monitor to display the exact same colors your printer will print by using the printer's profile sort of. This gives you the benefit of seeing the colors (proofing) by software (thus soft proofing) on the monitor before you print with your printer. If my printer uses a poor quality set of ink or if the profile I have is poorly made the colors will be nothing to brag about. So what's the big deal to see such colors on your monitor before actual printing?

What I really want is a mechanism, a work flow, a system, a technique or a tool that makes my printer to print the beautiful colors that are displayed on my monitor. The colors displayed on my monitor may be from a high quality drum scan of a slide that is superior in image quality. The monitor with its monitor profile will faithfully display the accurate colors of the source image. Working on such high quality images demands a high quality tube monitors costing over thousands of dolors. Some LCD monitors claim to achieve a same quality too. My ultimate goal is to make my printer to print as close or as accurate as possible the colors I see on such a monitor.

Now think about soft proofing. Will it help you achieve that goal? I don't think so. Soft proofing makes the expensive monitor to display the colors the printer will print using the printer's profile. This really fools you if you think finally the colors of your print matches the colors on the monitor. Of course the colors match if you make your monitor to display them in the first place. The question you will want to ask is if the printed colors matches or are close to the colors of the original image.

The answer is obvious. Soft proofing alone does not make it happen. It does not improve colors. If a salesman tries to sell you softp roofing and maks such bluff that it is the way to achieve perfect color matching you should know it only makes the colors on your monitor to match what the printer will print. That's the point I am trying to make.

 

[leo8088]

Just read the fisrt page of the link Mikling pointed to here: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/soft-proofing.shtml
It says it all. This is the exact word the author said: Soft proofing is simply a mechanism that allows you to view on your computer monitor what your print will look like when it is on paper.

It does not make your print to look like what the original image is. Got it?

 

[mikling]

"Blinded by the light"

 

[lolopr1]

Just read the fisrt page of the link Mikling pointed to here: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/soft-proofing.shtml
It says it all. This is the exact word the author said: Soft proofing is simply a mechanism that allows you to view on your computer monitor what your print will look like when it is on paper.

It does not make your print to look like what the original image is. Got it?

I do got it, that's the reason why I use soft proofing on all my prints...also I own the video from luminous landscape (From Camera To print) you should check it out, you be surprise what you can learn. You got a point when you said "Soft proofing alone does not make it happen" it's an important part in the process of getting accurate colors.

 

[lolopr1]

"Blinded by the light"

Amen to that!