I was a "senior consultant" for Xrite re. camera profiling, and a member of the ICC Digital Photography workgroup. Although Doug is a veritable encyclopedia, I believe I may be allowed to shed some light on this issue, from a practical standpoint.
1. Profiling for repro use will benefit hugely from being done in the repro illumination. In my opinion, a mediocre profile made just before the money shot is almost always better than a very good profile made under different illumination conditions ie. a "canned" profile. This is because an in-situ profile accurately captures information about lighting and lens -including lens colorations, room color reflections etc. Effectively, the white balance gets baked into the profile. Also, repro encourages stable and uniform lighting which is hugely beneficial to profiling.
2. The difficulty with good general purpose profiles as Torger points out is stuff like tone curves; this falls away with repro, which is more about accurately establishing in-situ primaries and effectively creating a profile for a single white balance IMHO. So it's not about the software, it's about having a good target and very uniform illumination on the target. A small target placed in the center of the field will reduce non-uniformity of light and lens vignetting.
3. The real difficulty with repro is that the subject is made out of pigments, and whatever you do they will often interact strangely with a digital camera's sensor CFA. There are known ways to work around this, and Doug might be selling some, but we're well outside the realm of "click" !
In summary, commercial profiling software should help you with repro but expect a learning curve while you figure out how to to the lighting setups.
Edmund
The Fine Art Reproduction ICC Profiles in Capture One CH paired with the DT Photon LED are the best option if you have the budget. This will produce exceptionally high color without custom profiling as they are all designed to work together (the digital back, the CH software, the color profile, and the lighting) for the specific task of reproduction photography.
In-situ profiles, such as those a user can generate with BasIIColor (we are dealers) will sometimes measure more accurately if you use the same target to create the calibration and validate/test the calibration (which is a very bad practice equivalent to "teaching to the test"), but will generally not perform as well as the Capture One CH reproduction profiles when you start to test with different targets. In situ profiles are also very sensitive to the method of creation (any flare, glare, or deviation from best practice will wreak havoc), and once made are very fragile (i.e. will falter quickly when you make any modifications to the lighting setup).
Our Cultural Heritage on Process Control, Lighting, and Capture One CH are all helpful to understand the underlying challenges in reproduction photography and how our tools help address them.
Of the many institutions using our solutions most are using Capture One CH profiles rather than in-situ profiling.
