Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Colour Management => Topic started by: Gupfold on May 25, 2009, 01:07:02 am
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Hi there,
Does anyone know of any good free or cheap software for making a scanner or camera profile? I am aware of the AIM X-profiler (a spreadsheet type app) that gives nice results but it crashes easily and is very slow and with me seems to work with very small files only. Is there anything that can compete with the heavies like Profilemaker?
Thanks
Guy
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Hi there,
Does anyone know of any good free or cheap software for making a scanner or camera profile? I am aware of the AIM X-profiler (a spreadsheet type app) that gives nice results but it crashes easily and is very slow and with me seems to work with very small files only. Is there anything that can compete with the heavies like Profilemaker?
Thanks
Guy
Site seems to be down at the moment but Argyll CMS (http://www.argyllcms.com/) is the generally recommended one.
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Argyll.
Can do mostly anything. How well is a matter of opinion.
A ColorMunki might be your best bundle however, as a spectro is a necessity for printer profiles.
Edmund
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Argyll. Can do mostly anything. How well is a matter of opinion.
A ColorMunki might be your best bundle however, as a spectro is a necessity for printer profiles.
Edmund
The Argyll site still seems to be down but I am interested, you don't seem to convinced, what didn't you like?
Is making a profile not purely mathematical what would make one software better at measuring a target and calculating the differences than another?
I have looked at ColorMunki and Spyder3Print and cant decide, but at the moment I just need to do some experimenting with a scanner profile mostly for reflective scanning.
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The Argyll site still seems to be down but I am interested, you don't seem to convinced, what didn't you like?
Is making a profile not purely mathematical what would make one software better at measuring a target and calculating the differences than another?
I have looked at ColorMunki and Spyder3Print and cant decide, but at the moment I just need to do some experimenting with a scanner profile mostly for reflective scanning.
Making a profile is mathematically easy, I believe, if you have lots of patches in the target; however that is not a situation which is very pleasant when you have to handread the patches. The nice thing about ColorMunki is that it makes good profiles from just a few patches.
Regarding Argyll, I wrote a Linux wrapper demo for Barbieri for their LFP instrument, and the RGB profiles I generate with 1400 patches and Argyll are competitive *to my eyes* with the profiles I generated using an Xrite iSis XL, Xrite's Profile Maker Pro software and the 4000 patch Atkinson targets. In any case they are what I use for my own gallery work. But I did have to invest a few weeks in getting things to work like I need them. I'm not going to say anything bad about Argyll, it is maturing into a nice profiling tool and it can do a lot of things which no other tool can do.
However I would still recommend that anyone needing to profile for quick inkjet art printing just get a ColorMunki at this point, or get a consultant (eg. Andrew, Ethan or me) to generate profiles.
Edmund