Hi
I have just had a frustrating day trying to make a print from a painting.
1. I lit the painting with studio lights, using a Color-Checker Passport generated profile and a graycard for white balance.
Hi William,
Maybe it has something to do with the profile you used as a base profile, e.g. Lightroom and ACR can make use of the Adobe DNG Profile Editor, but it is just a
modification of a base profile, and we do not know how good that base profile was for the specific color you are having trouble with. Capture One can also create '
modified' (ICC) profiles with its built-in Color Editor tool.
Building a profile from scratch should give a better chance of success, especially if patches of the difficult color can be added to the profile creation/optimization.
It may also be a result of the camera's native color sensitivity as seen through the CFA. A bluish/green jade color, may well fall exactly between the Green and Blue transmission curves, and it depends on the amount of overlap of both color ranges if it stands a chance of being picked up with good reconstruction quality. So a different camera might in that case solve part of the issue.
2. I then made a few small adjustments, with the painting still illuminated, on my calibrated NEC PA272W. I made an accurate on-screen match with the painting.
3. I then soft-proofed the picture and made a print using a custom-made profile for Hahnemuhle Museum Etching on a Canon iPF8400.
We'll have to assume those profiles were good. You may want to check that by printing some critical test images, or a Granger rainbow.
There is a Bluish-green colour (jade, according to the artist) that I cannot even get close to - it is miles out! It prints to a dark blue no matter how I try to tweak it...
At some point though, it becomes ridiculous in terms of what a proper colour-managed workflow should be!
Well, most camera profiles are created for pleasing colors, not accurate ones. You need something more accurate than pleasing.
Cheers,
Bart