They don't make that obvious.How does it perform and compare to an X-Rite profile ?So given you need a spectro (which would come with it's own software), it would have to deliver significantly better profiles to justify the expense.
My experience with Basicolor hasn't been great in the past WRT to support for their monitor profiling software, so it would have to offer a LOT for me to drop the dosh.
Full disclosure. I was kindly given a copy of DropRGB (and other apps in the BasscColor suite of software) for evaluation by Karl Koch, CEO of BasiCColor. So, I can't really comment on BasicColor Support as I've never had to use it.
Like others reading this thread, if you own a spectrophotometer designed primarily for color managment/ICC profiling, then you probably already have some ICC profiling software. As such, the relatively high price tag for DropRGB may well be a barrier not too many folks with existing instrumentation will want to step over, IMHO. In my case, I have both older PM5 software to use with my venerable Spectrolino/Spectroscans, and an up to date version of i1Profiler which came with the Xrite i1Pro2 Photo hardware/software kit. i1Profiler can also take measurement files from the older PM5 software as can DropRGB. Hence, I didn't seem to have any compelling reason to invest in DropRGB and actually had never heard of it until recently. That said, I have indeed had a fair amount of time now to try it, and compare its output to both PM5 and i1Profiler output. I conclude it is really quite a brilliant piece of software, a huge timesaver for one thing, especially for those that make ICC profiles on a routine basis like I do for printer/ink/media combinations that go into Aardenburg light fade tests.
As was noted earlier, and apparently confusing matters a bit, for those with no instrumentation you can apparently send BasicColor a printed target by snail mail, and they will send you back a measurement file via internet. Drop that file onto DropRGB, and it creates an ICC profile which you can set to place in the folder of your choice on your computer. For those of us with instrumentation which can create a standard CGATS formatted measurement file, then yes, all you do is is measure the data with your own instrument and then drop the measurement file onto the DropRGB window, and it creates an ICC profile. I think some other formats may be supported as well, but CGATS and the old "text" files made by PM5 are data files I know for certain work. But wait, there's more,
You can take an existing ICC profile and drop it onto the DropRGB app and it will reprocess the measurement data saved inside the existing ICC profile thus giving you the DropRGB rendering flavor in all its goodness. I don't know if that works for all ICC profiles out there today, but it definitely works with ones I make via i1Profiler and the older PM5 software.
So, how does it stack up to i1Profiler, and why do I even still use PM5 in this day and age? Well, PM5 offers the original " logo classic" mode for rendering the perceptual tag, and that algorithm favors lightness accuracy over hue and chroma accuracy which can be extremely important with some digital image files, whereas "logo Colorful" favors hue and Chroma at the expense of lightness, often a nice choice over relcol/wBPC when choosing rendering intents, but not always. i1Profiler offers a lot of controls and a couple default rendering modes, one default that is also called "Colorful" and which does indeed mimic the original PM5 logo Colorful algorithm pretty well. However, the other controls like smoothness and neutrality, are a bit of a black box. Most i1Profiler users wouldn't really know where to set them or what those controls actually mean for profile quality. I've tested extensively, and when you set smoothness and neutrality settings to a custom setting different from the default, you can often improve profile accuracy in the low chroma/neutral values, not really anything related to color gamut and thus not anything you can tell by merely looking at gamut volume plots. You have to run color and tonal value accuracy tests to see what's happening with the i1Profiler custom settings. I found that deviating from i1Profiler default settings can be very useful to improve profile quality for many printer/ink/media combinations. So, that said, DropRGB has a very simple "optimization" feature, at least simple in terms of ease of use over i1Profiler. That optimization feature looks for "suspect" measurement data (as the i1Profiler "smoothness" setting probably does, too), and it corrects for that data variation quite well. DropRGB is also giving me better neutral tone response with less gray patches than I can achieve in i1Profiler unless I resort to higher patch count in i1Profiler and increase the neutrality slider setting. To date, the most accurate Profiles I've built in i1Profiler are comparable to what I get with no effort from DropRGB, but I have to tinker with those i1Profiler settings by trial and error, and not just accept the default conditions in i1Profiler. So, in this sense, DropRGB is a real time saver.
I could go on with even more comments, but I hope folks get the idea. DropRGB has some pretty cool mathematics hidden behind a very simple interface, not that it's better than i1Profiler in ultimate profile quality achievable, but it is usually better out of the box with virtually no steep learning curve like one will face with i1Profiler unless you accept the Xrite default settings and don't explore any further.
cheers,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com
