<x-charset iso-8859-1>Your eye-balling procedure can be performed for free by adjusting brightness, contrast, saturation, and individual colors in the Epson printer software. And if you're eye-balling, why would you need a calibrated target? Alternately, you can adjust the existing Epson printer profiles, or any other 3rd-party prepared or 3rd-party software prepared profiles, visually in Photoshop with DoctorPro from Colorvision, profile editing software (I don't have it so I can't vouch for it). Your suggested prices BTW are IMHO backwards - scanner-based profiling software runs from about $80 (WiziWYG) to $199 (Profiler RGB), while the editing software DoctorPro is $299. Maris ----- Original Message ----- From: "Julian Vrieslander" <julianv@mindspring.com> To: <epson-inkjet@leben.com> Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2001 4:42 PM Subject: Printer profiling by eyeball (?) | I was thinking about buying one of the scanner-based printer profilers. | But after reading all the tales of endless tweaking and frustration, I | decided to hold off. Perhaps the technology behind these products (or | the cheap scanners that they rely upon) needs to mature. | | If the scanner is the weak link in these systems, I'm wondering if it is | possible to build a printer profile without a scanner or spectro, using | only feedback from human visual judgments. I'm thinking of something | like Epson's print head alignment procedure, where the user prints out a | series of samples, makes a choice, inputs that choice to the software, | and interates if necessary. | | Suppose I have a target page with a set of calibrated color patches (IT-8 | or Macbeth Colorchecker, or something optimized for this particular | task). I run the profiling software, and in its first phase it prints | out a test page carrying several variants of the color patches on the | target page. So for example, there might be a calibrated blue patch on | the target. My printed test page has a series of blue patches, which | vary around the target color, from the cyan-ish side to the magenta-ish | side. I compare the test and target pages under my preferred lighting | source, and pick out the test patch which best matches the target blue. | Then I enter the code for that test patch into the software. I do the | same for several other color series. The software then generates a new | test page with refined settings, I enter more data, and repeat until the | test page provides a good match. When I confirm the match, the program | generates a profile. | | I have not used any of the existing profiling products, but I know that | some of them contain visual-based editing facilities. What I am | wondering now, is whether it is possible to create a printer profiling | system that uses ONLY visual judgements for feedback. Perhaps an | eyeball-based system would not match the precision of an expensive | hardware spectro. But maybe the results would not be much worse than the | results people are getting from scanner-based profilers. I also wonder | if an eyeball-based product could be marketed for a more attractive price | than the current options. Since I don't own a flatbed, a scanner-based | profiling system is going to cost me something like $300 to 500. Why | wouldn't it be possible to sell an eyeball-based program, bundled with | calibrated target, for $99 or less? | | -- | Julian Vrieslander <mailto:julianv@mindspring.com> | | - | Turn off HTML mail features. Keep quoted material short. Use accurate | subject lines. http://www.leben.com/lists for list instructions. | - Turn off HTML mail features. Keep quoted material short. Use accurate subject lines. http://www.leben.com/lists for list instructions. </x-charset>