Re: Printer profiling by eyeball (?)

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<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>
|
| -
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