I think that Fogra MW3.0 is intended to control the stability of your printer and paper rather than for profile quality check.
Agreed. In fact, the colors used for these evaluations IMHO require a custom built reference.
I can explain how I would go about the process. I’d use ColorThink for one, its invaluable for this kind of work for creating custom targets for profile evaluation,
not profile creation. You can do this with a combo of Photoshop of course, ColorThink and ColorPort from X-rite (free).
First, the idea is to examine the
expected values for patch colors and those that you measure through the profile. A target is necessary of course. First thing is deciding what patches are appropriate and hence, the reason it makes some sense to build a custom target instead of using the target that built the profile. For example, lets say you work in Adobe RGB (1998) as your working space. It makes little sense to test your profile using a target where some of the patches fall outside Adobe RGB (1998). You’re asking for errors. So building a target in that color space with “legal” values is helpful while the target you used to build the profile probably have out of gamut colors. The same is true when building CMYK profiles. The targets are all 400% TAC which you’ll never run. Using such a target for these tests skew the actual reported data you get.
Next you can save off this file such that every pixel is a single color (using Nearest Neighbor will do this). If your target has 33x45 rows and columns, you’ll need a 33x45 pixel document to feed to ColorThink and ColorPort. Prior to any conversions, this would be the “source” (reference) data. Save that off as a TIFF. Next, convert the original TIFF from (in this case, Adobe RGB (1998) ) through the profile you’re checking. You would want to do this with Perceptual and Colorimetric unless you have a workflow where the rendering intent is fixed, then just use that. You want to do this in Photoshop so you can use Black Point Compensation. You could do this conversion in ColorThink using color lists but it doesn’t yet support BPC. Save this converted document (lets say for simplicity, you just converted using Perceptual intent). You now have two small TIFFs where each pixel is one color in your target. One is the reference, one is the result though the profile. Expected and resulting Lab values.
If you load one of the Tiffs into ColorThink, you can build a ColorList using each individual color. Save it out as Lab data as a txt file. Do the same with the other TIFF converted with your profile from Photoshop. You now have two text files in Lab, one is the reference (colors in the target), the other are the results from the profile. You drag them into ColorThink and click on the deltaE button and there you go, average, max, etc values and you can sort by highest deltaE to see where in colorspace, you’re having issues.
To create custom targets to print and measure, you can use ColorPort. It will import a color list, build off targets (Tiffs that will print and read through a supported instrument) and measure the targets too if you wish. Be careful with UV Cut and non cut measurements. Ideally you’d do this test both ways. OBAs can really skew things (fun finding a paper with a -6 b*). This is useful because you don’t have to rely on the targets from Munki which are far smaller and different than the targets from ProfileMaker or whatever product you used. And since its the same target you built for both profiles, its apples to apples comparison.
Then the question becomes, depending on the device, not only how large was the target used to BUILD the profile, did it get printed a number of times in different patch sizes and orientation, then averaged (with outliers being tossed)? For presses, that’s super important. For our ink jet printers, maybe overkill but might be useful. And again, the patch size used for building the profile is pretty important for Spectrophotometer’s that average measurements per patch as an EyeOne Pro or iSis can. For example, for digital press profiles I’m building, I have one ECI target that has patches so large, it takes 3 11x17 patches to print out just this one target. Then its rotated (three more pages) and there’s a two patch, smaller patch target also output in both orientations. Total four ECI targets (10 pages) all averaged for a single press (now do this with each press and average all that data to build the profile).