LightJet 5000 Calibration....

[RomanJohnston]

I have access to a LightJet 5000 via somone who purchased a printing operation. They are not totally familar with the unit and I have been working with them to figure things out a bit....and the biggest concern right now is color calibration.

The have professional Eye One equipment to create profiles with....and I am wondering if in fact LightJets can be treated the same and can work with profiles?

Do they have normal drivers like a printer that you can use photoshop to print to it?...or is it more like a dedicated print controller (maybe somthing like a RIP?)

Just trying to get some feedback and some clues before I meet with them.

I have been tryig to hunt down a factory rep....and seem to be getting close...but just in case anyone here has some experience.

Roman

[Scott Martin]

I used to operate an RGB drum scanner and one of the first Lightjets in the country in the mid 90s. Those were exciting times. There are several ways of interfacing with the Lightjet these days, most of which still are not color management savvy.  You can certainly makes custom profiles for the Lightjet and will get better results because of them. Perform a fresh calibration immediately before printing a profiling target. MonacoProfiler's 2 step profiling process will generate better profiles than any GMB solution for this type of device. Images are typically converted to the print space in Photoshop or any number of mass workflow applications (DP2, Labtricity, etc) before sending over to the Lightjet.

[MDTeal]

Roman,

The LightJet should have a PC hooked to it via a SCSI cable and running a program called LJFE or LightJet Front End. This software/PC combo combined with a densitometer are used to calibrate the loaded paper and processor chemistry.

Usually, a 3rd party rip like PosterShop is used to submit files to the LJFE. If that's the case, then profiling should done through them.

Without a rip, the LJFE just transfers RGB tiff data to the 5000 and does nothing with profiles. This can be a good thing...no convoluted rip screening algorithms to complicate the issue. Once your media is calibrated, treat this as an RGB output device. First generate Linearization patches in Monaco or PM5 and save them out as a tif file then transfer that to the LJFE. Once that has been processed and read, you can follow it with the profile patches.

After you create your profile, you will need to do all color management (profile conversions) in PhotoShop. Essentially you want to convert your image to the output profile before you fine tune your color and submit it to the LJFE for printing. I suggest giving it a different name so you don't overwrite your master file.

check out www.cymbolic.com and www.oceusa.com for more info.

-Mike

[RomanJohnston]

Thank you very much for both of your info!!!

I think I got what I need....went to the manufacturs site and also downloaded every thing they had that was relevant.

Roman

[digitaldog]

The have professional Eye One equipment to create profiles with....and I am wondering if in fact LightJets can be treated the same and can work with profiles?
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Sure, I've built profiles for this device over the years.