[Stephane Bosman Participant Posts: 32]

Printing Colour Management

on: January 1, 2022 at 2:53 pm

Sorry if this is a bit long.

I am in the habit of making my own profiles, for display and for print.

For printing profile I measure targets with my GretagMacbeth i1 Rev. A, which I bought new about 18 years ago.

I just found out I had some leftovers of Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta and wanted to try it in my Canon Pro-1000.

So I just made a profile for it with my i1 and ArgyllCMS. I have an M1 Mac Mini andX-Rite will not support my admittedly old i1 with i1Profiler.

Out of curiosity, before doing any prints, I compared my profile with the one provided by Hahnemühle. They are  different, as expected, but I did not expect the  gamut difference to be so much.

My profile in white wireframe, Hahnemühle’s profile in colour:

So, I have a few questions:

1. Is this to be expected?
2. Which profile should I use?
3. If this is not normal, would it mean my spectrophotometer is now too old? Do they have a stated life expectancy?
4. If the time has come to replace it, the current verision is i1pro 3 Publish, quite expensive, although in line with prices evolutions since 2004. Would I lose much by going with the Calibrite Colorchecker i1 Studio?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Stephane Bosman Participant Posts: 32]

Re: Canned vs. Self-Made profiles

Reply #1 on: January 1, 2022 at 2:57 pm

That is the second time I posted this topic. The first post has simply disappeared.

To my first attempt, Andrew Rodney kindly replied:

Sorry but I can’t see any of your screen grabs. That said, if they are of gamut maps and volumes, that’s not really indicative of profile quality per se. Make prints using good, color reference images. Profiles know nothing about images or color in context, you do when you view prints. Also, not all gamut viewing products work the same or ideally, see:

http://www.colorwiki.com/wiki/Color_Management_Myths_26-28#Myth_26

You could have a larger gamut profile with poor gray balance. Or a Perceptual table that makes very saturated blues shift magenta or even black. You would only see this if you actually output to print, images that test a profile in this way. Do that first, then maybe plot the printers gamut. Now if you view a gamut map that has a massive dip or spike somewhere, that could indicate a problem with measurement or elsewhere, but you’d see that in a split second on a print too.

His reply can till be seen at:  https://photopxl.com/forums/topic/self-made-vs-canned-profiles/#post-47106

 

[Mark D Segal Silver Member Posts: 951]

Re: Canned vs. Self-Made profiles

Reply #2 on: January 1, 2022 at 3:08 pm

No, that big a difference between a Hahn profile and your custom profile for the same paper/printer combination would be unusual for a professional printer. Normally one would expect minimal performance variance between the printer on which they made the profile and your profiling. In any event it may be preferable to use the profile with the widest gamut. That said, there may not be much practical difference of results on this parameter alone, because the images would need to have enough colours sufficiently out of the Hahn gamut for you to see a difference. More important may be the relative accuracy of colour rendition, which you can evaluate using a test chart with known file reference values, or just look at several photos printed with each and see which looks more correct to you.

Without seeing the actual gamut volume number of your profile it’s hard to say whether the result of your profiling is “abnormal”. For that Canon printer your gamut volume should be somewhere in the range of 800,000 ~850,000 as calculated in Color Think Pro. If it were far out of this range then there may be something amiss with your profile, but whether it would be on account of the device or how you implemented the whole process one cannot tell. The manner of printing the targets of course is critical. Presumably you know that all colour management needs to be disabled and you know how to do that reliably for the Canon Pro-1000 printer.

The spectro does not have a “best before” date that I know of, but depending on how it’s been used and stored, it could need to be recertified. But I wouldn’t go to the trouble and expense of recertifying that model, nor am I sure whether they still offer the service for that model. The i1Pro3 is so much better. You don’t need I1Pro3 Publish unless you need to make CMYK profiles for pre-press work. If you are only printing to an inkjet printer, buying the i1Pro 3 Photo package is quite a bit less expensive and would do all you need. You could also ask them whether you would qualify for upgrade pricing – just in case. I don’t know the Colorchecker i1 Studio so I can’t answer that aspect -perhaps Andrew could jump in if he knows it, which he well may.

[Stephane Bosman Participant Posts: 32]

Re: Canned vs. Self-Made profiles

Reply #3 on: January 1, 2022 at 5:14 pm

My mistake. I wrongly selected one of the profiles in the comparison. Shameful, I should have double-checked.

This is the correct comparison:

Exactly identical gamut, although the Hahnemühle profile is different..

The profile generated with a more sensible calculation time is slightly different, but not enough to visually impact images.

Still, not bad for an 18 years old instrument!

Sorry for the wasted time everyone, and thank you, I still learned something thanks to you.

[Stephane Bosman Participant Posts: 32]

Re: Canned vs. Self-Made profiles

Reply #4 on: January 1, 2022 at 5:26 pm

I checked prints of the Keith Cooper test image for B&W and Datacolor for colour. Very, very close, as expected. The main difference is a slightly lower DMax with the Argyll profile (2.59 vs.  2.66), leading to very slightly more open deep shadows. “Slightly” is the operative word, here.

[Mark D Segal Silver Member Posts: 951]

Re: Canned vs. Self-Made profiles

Reply #5 on: January 1, 2022 at 5:38 pm

That’s better. 🙂

Glad it’s sorted. Happy New Year!

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