Profiling pro 9500 to Image Specialist inks

[Emulator]

Rod

I have run it again with the same result, double click on thumbnail to enlarge image of last printer window.



Try it yourself, see if 9500 is the same as 9000 II.

Regards

Ian

 

[rodbam]

I never use print preview so I will try this out soon. It seems strange that the borders are ignored with the fine art paper setting.

 

[Emulator]

If you look at the small window which shows you ink status and printing progress. When you print CM test charts it says "Bit map printing test", so this may be why they behave differently.

 

[cls]

maybe of topic but using Colormunki OEM software for printing colorpatches is are vastly waste of paper just fitting 50 color patches on one A4 sheet.

 

[rodbam]

That's interesting cis but I'm happy to use two A4 sheets to get a good for me profile. I can't be bothered to fit more patches on an A4 sheet & use a ruler to scan it, I'm a bit lazy I think.

 

[Emulator]

I had a look through the Xrite ColorMunki directory to see if I could find an image file, containing a profiling test chart, but did not find anything.

This leads me to the conclusion that CM generates the test charts as bitmaps, each time, as required.

Thus, unlike some other makes of profiler, there is no chart to send to anyone, for whatever reason!!

It is a clever approach and facilitates their profile optimisation process, giving a more or less unlimited multi patch mechanism directly tailored to the type of images you are producing.

I must say it has worked exceptionally well in all my tests and the profile files get bigger as you go.

I think the bitmap printing of the charts is why they do not behave like ordinary image files on your fine art papers Rod.

 

[jtoolman]

I believe that the first chart is a bitmap but without any embedded color space. No embedded profile in other words. They have very carefully covered the set of 50 values. these values if you could interpolate between them, theoretically would cover a pretty large gamut.
The printer will attempt to reproduce those 50 values as accurately as possible. Because you only choose paper type and quality, and turn off color management, the 50 patch print will be printer without any interference from the printer driver.
Now you scan these patches and the colormunki with record the actual values the printer produced. Now this is where I am not entirely sure what happens but I think a comparison is made between the original values and the printed ones. The software now generates a compensatory chart that supposedly tells it how to compensate for the errors per patch.
OR..... the SW is generating a second set of colors having nothing to do with the 1st one. Thus having 100 total patches to print and analyze.
Regardless of what is actually happening, in practice, which is what really matters, I have found that the CM produces excellent ICM profiles that at least for me and my printer Army with multiple papers and inks.

Since I am always thinking out of the box and basically I rely on my general lack of real knowledge in the engineering side of these calibrators, I took the plunge and decided to run and optimization of one of my CM profiles.
Now as I understand the option, you are supposed to load an image you are intending to print, with your just created in order to create a custom tweaked profile JUST for the values that that image files contains.

I thought, why not run an optimization, but load a 1200 patch tif file. Well I did that and the CM generated a third 50 patch print which after drying I scanned. The new profile was same with the same name but I added "Optimized" to it. That way I did not overwrite the original.

Now for the proof in the pudding.

I printed 2 sets of prints from one color Adobe RGB file and the same but converted to Gray scale.

First color and B&W set was printed using the 1st profile ( not optimized )
The color print was great. The B&W was also great BUT a bit on the warm side but still lovely. No one would complain.

Second color and B&W set was printed using the 2nd profile ( optimized )
The color print was also great. The B&W though, was dead on neutral.

By the way I had overlaid a Black to White 20 step wedge on both files to make sure I was able to discern each and ever step between the deepest and the next to white.

Both profiles were able to print all the steps.

So whether what I did was supposed to work or not, I can not argue with the results.

Oh by the way, I did this on the R2000. Yes folks, a single black printer. I originally did it of my R3800 which absolutely needs custom profiles due to the fact that I using OCP K3 + OEM Magenta ( extracted from 220 ml large format carts from Ebay ) hybrid ink set. Advance Black and White absolutely will not print a neutral print. So that is why I did this, though I was almost 100% that it would not work.

The process is simple and quick and I can't imagine not having a colormunki.

Joe

 

[Emulator]

Hi Joe

I agree with your theory and findings. The unknown is the software procedure used to determine the optimisation bitmap chart from the "image".

Presumably it looks for shades of colour in the image which may not be addressed or precisely defined by the processing of the earlier charts. Perhaps filling in the gaps in more detail if there is a range of closely related shades.

I have "optimised" profiles by using the various test images available on the web, e.g. the Evaluation Tiff image, which covers a lot of areas which are likely to be of concern.

I imagine the process as applying corrections to what should in theory be graphically linear slopes of colour values.

Regards Emu

 

[jtoolman]

That's what I think is taking place.
Recently I tried something I thought might be a bit odd.
I optimized a CM profile for an Epson 1400 ( 6 Color Dye Printer ) using Precision Colors / Image Specialists inks, which by it self was not producing a good linearly neutral B&W print. By loading a test print that contained 256 black to white patches I figure that it might help out.
The 50 patch file that the CM software generated had patches that were NOT ALL neutral as I figured they would be!!!!! I was somewhat perplexed until I realized that in doing so, the software used some of the information within the CM profile I was trying to optimize. Though I originally thought is was odd, I ran it anyway and saved it as a separate ICM profile.
I think that those slightly warm and cooler patches of differing densities, represented possible shades that the printer ink / paper combination could not produce as linearly neutral shades. Again, since I am not a trained color engineer I am simply using layman's logic here.
However I proceeded to print that same image file containing those 256 black to white patches I could not really visually detect any patches that where not visually neutral. I think I can use the CM to read the LAB values of some representative patches for a less subjective neutrality check.

Again, it seems to actually help.

 

[Emulator]

Yes, I use the spot reading facility for L*ab or sRGB values, very useful.

I have been looking to see what is available on the web in the way of software to display profile content. There is ICC Profile Inspector and wxProfileDump.exe, (both free), in which you can examine profile colour values and settings, but they do not really help that much in visualising the differences. There is WinColor.exe which works with Win XP, but not the newer OSs.

I think ColorThink 2 by Chromix would be very interesting, but that is not cheap for the amateur!

Does anyone know of any other open source?