RE: Profile City Profiles

["Les Berkley" <wogears@fast.net>]

> -----Original Message-----
> Subject: Profile City Profiles
> 
> I recently had a custom profile made by Profile City for my Epson 1290
> printer with CIS / Generations 4 / Archival Matte paper.
> 
> I followed all the instructions carefully to print the initial
> Linearisation
> Target, followed by the customised Profiling Target, and in due course
> received my profile.
> 
> After installing the profile, I tried printing the Profiling Target
with
> the
> profile, to compare with a print made without it. Unfortunately, the
new
> print, although different from the unprofiled one, was still far from
> satisfactory. The neutral gradient in the target had several very
obvious
> tonal steps, with colour balance varying from red to blue to yellow
along
> the gradient.
> 
(Big Snip)

Hello!

Your lin target is not in any particular color space, and hence should
not be used as a test for your profile. Targets are not images, but sets
of numbers. To evaluate your custom profile, you should compare an image
having a wide range of known color values-- one of your own files, or
something like the PhotoDisk test file. This file should be viewed on a
calibrated (i.e. characterized and profiled) monitor using a ColorSync
(Mac) or ICM (Windows) aware application. The colors of the soft-proofed
on-screen image and the print, viewed under appropriate D50 lighting,
should be substantially identical.

Profile City has a well-deserved reputation for quality; I suspect they
are not at fault. Color management is a very complex matter which
depends on a number of factors: monitor calibration; color-management
within applications; and output device profiles. The learning curve is
HUGE! I expect I am about 25% of the way along, but this may be
optimistic. This means I can get good prints on a specific printer/media
combination using my profiled monitor, with files having nicely in-gamut
colors. Most of the time... <g>

Les



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