Raw & Post Processing, Printing > Printing: Printers, Papers and Inks
ImagePrint or i1Pro 2?
HumptyDumpty:
As I venture further into my printing adventure I am starting to more and more desire better print quality and get more and more lured by syren song of better printer profiles.
I first looked at getting something like i1Pro 2 Photo. Pro is I would be able to create my own profiles. Cons are:
1. It's $1,200
2. It would take time to build them and I have no expertise in building them nor time to become an expert so they would probably not be as good as ones made by somebody like Andrew Rodney
3. I don't make profiles regularly so once I built several I need i1Pro would be sitting in the corner gathering dust and if I ever upgrade to printer model that has built in profiler i1Pro would become redundant
Then I considered paying somebody to make them for me. Pros of that are obvious (I would get better profile than I can ever create in less time). Cons are:
1. Cost wouldn't be as high as cost of i1Pro but it still would be good part of it
2. If I get different printer or want to try some new papers I would have to go through it all over again rising my cost, quickly exceeding cost of i1Pro, and introducing delays
Then I read somewhere that even a best profile can't completely improve print quality, that part of an issue is due to, IIRC, manufacturer's printer drivers are "not linearized" and thus only way to get best quality possible is to go around manufacturer's drivers and use RIP.
So I started looking at ImagePrint. Pros are:
1. For 17" printer (what I have) it's cheaper than i1Pro
2. I don't have to build profiles nor worry about cost of new profiles
3. Allegedly it results in best print quality one can get
Cons are:
1. It supports only Epsons. I don't see myself printing wider than what 3880 can in the near future but if I was to go wider, or if my 3880 died, my next printer would be most likely Canon and at that point in time my investment in ImagePrinmt would be lost and I would be back at square one.
So what are your thoughts / what you would do / recommend?
digitaldog:
If your aim is ICC output profiles, build your own with a caveat comming. If you need the functionality of IP, that's a different story. It's a good product (well I haven't used nor needed it since version 6). But I don't see the two being on parity. You could spend less and get a ColorMunki which is limited but builds good profiles. Maybe you can live with canned profiles from the paper manufacturers and spend nothing more! Not all profiles are created equally (more about that soon). But it is possible you don't need to spend anything more....
HumptyDumpty:
--- Quote from: digitaldog on November 23, 2015, 05:59:37 pm ---If your aim is ICC output profiles, build your own with a caveat comming. If you need the functionality of IP, that's a different story. It's a good product (well I haven't used nor needed it since version 6). But I don't see the two being on parity. You could spend less and get a ColorMunki which is limited but builds good profiles. Maybe you can live with canned profiles from the paper manufacturers and spend nothing more! Not all profiles are created equally (more about that soon). But it is possible you don't need to spend anything more....
--- End quote ---
My goal is to get best print quality possible. That is why I was considering going beyond paper manufacturer profiles and I am hearing ImagePrint takes that up even further.
robgo2:
Count me as a very satisfied user of ImagePrint with my 3880. When I printed out of Photoshop with custom profiles, I was very satisfied with the results, but when I made the leap to IP, I could see the difference. Moreover, IP makes the printing process very fast and easy (e.g. resizing and sharpening files with just a few clicks of the mouse). I have found final output soft proofing inside the program to be especially useful, even though I also soft proof in PS using ImagePrint's profiles. What you see is mighty close to what you get. Now are the results better than what you could get creating custom profiles with iLPro? That is a question I cannot answer.
Rob
Stefan Ohlsson:
--- Quote from: HumptyDumpty on November 23, 2015, 05:27:40 pm ---
So I started looking at ImagePrint. Pros are:
1. For 17" printer (what I have) it's cheaper than i1Pro
2. I don't have to build profiles nor worry about cost of new profiles
3. Allegedly it results in best print quality one can get
Cons are:
1. It supports only Epsons. I don't see myself printing wider than what 3880 can in the near future but if I was to go wider, or if my 3880 died, my next printer would be most likely Canon and at that point in time my investment in ImagePrinmt would be lost and I would be back at square one.
So what are your thoughts / what you would do / recommend?
--- End quote ---
I do my own profiles and I use ImagePrint. The profiles that I create is for my proofing RIP, not for ImagePrint. I also do profiles for some of my clients. They make smaller prints, using the Epson driver. Then they come to me and we do the large format prints with ImagePrint. When I use the x900 printers I can see a small but significant difference between the prints. It seems like that the Epson profiles don't use that much of the orange and green inks that the Imageprint profiles do. You can see an improvement in some portraits and landscape images. This will also give the prints better light fastness, as those inks don't fade as fast as the yellow ink does.
For B&W there is a bigger difference. For me, one of the big advantages of ImagePrint is the result that I get when I use the narrow gamut tint picker. I can adjust the tint of the image, so I can emulate the effects that I got in the darkroom by choosing different papers, developers and toners. I've tried several other methods for printing B&W images, but I haven't seen anything better.
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