> -----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 - Turn off HTML mail features. Keep quoted material short. Use accurate subject lines. http://www.leben.com/lists for list instructions.