Paper Profiling

[philipkenney]

Hi, I'm new to the forum. I found this forum because of the wealth of information I found (both on the site and forum) on more fine art processes of photography. I started with film and in the darkroom in college, but moved to digital. I've missed the hands on style of the darkroom and started to research digital darkrooms with great excitement!

I'm working on building a digital darkroom and I'm buying an Epson 7900 shortly (I'm a wedding photographer primarily but also do landscape work on the side - I really want to bring the idea of fine art processing to wedding photography and my landscape photography). Once I ind the papers I am interested in (just going to use 2 or 3 and get to know them well), I was planning on buying the print calibrator for the spyder 3 system I already have (just to get my feet wet, you know?). My question is if anyone has had experience with calibrating a printer and paper to different light sources the prints will be viewed at (incandescent, fluorescent, daylight, mixtures of all three, etc). I would love to be able to ask what kind of light the viewing area is for my clients and print accordingly. Is this too much work for not enough benefit? I know there are a couple of RIPs that do this, but I like the idea of doing it myself at least at first to understand the process and to be more hands on.

Thanks! Excited about being a part of the community here and I hope my ignorance, especially in this area, does not become annoying!

[VitOne]

I think that you could find interesting the i1Profiler i1PhotoPRO: http://blog.xritephoto.com/?p=2878
Using it you can easly create different profiles for diffrent conditions.
I don't know what your budget is but if you are going to be an Epson 7900 user this could be an interesting solutions.

[philipkenney]

Yeah, I know eventually I would want something more accurate or to just get a RIP. That is planned to be in the budget probably next year, but for now I want to take a step in the right direction, see how it works, and then next year evaluate whether I want to buy a nicer calibration tool or just get a RIP. Who knows, if sales go better I might be able to upgrade sooner rather than later!

[aaronchan]

RIP should not under your consideration because you do not want to spend more then a day to learn how to use your printer. A RIP might overkill what you want to do.

For your original question, unless the print looks really bad under certain light condition, for example, a magenta neon lamp is sitting in front of your print. Otherwise, most of the print that I made with all of my different ICC generator software and printers does not make a "Huge/Unacceptable" different to my clients. Just use D50 as your view light condition and it should work pretty well for your business.

[VitOne]

I think that you should first consider to evaluate carefully the Epson driver before you move to a RIP. I own a 7900 and I am fine with the driver at the moment. Because I could want a RIP I picked the i1Publish (this allows you to make CMYK profiles, here the you can find the “unpacking” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OEFzwCmnCc) but at the moment I am using only the RGB profiling part of the software.
If you do a fast search on this forum you can easily find that many people are happy with their drivers. Because you can always spend for a RIP later I recommend you to try the drivers first.
I didn’t understand if you are looking for something more accurate than an i1Pro, is this correct?

[philipkenney]

Thanks for tips on the RIPs. A RIP was really going to be a last resort if I have issues on my own. VitOne, I was referring to more accurate than the Spyder system. I know its just a colorimeter but for getting started, if anything, it should be getting me closer and not farther away from stock. I am going to try the drivers first and see how those work. I hope they do work out, but I wouldn't mind trying my own as well to see how they compare. My goal was to compare stock with what the Spyder system can do and then if I'm still dissatisfied go for the x-rite i1Pro.

Aaron, thanks for the response as well. I changed the lighting in my office to D50 lighting and noticed a difference in the prints I had in here. That made me rethink the whole profiling for different lighting conditions thing. Obviously, the beauty and curse of having your own printing capabilities is that you can play around and customize all day long. My goal is to hopefully get that out of my system quick so I can focus on the more important thing of fulfilling orders.

THanks for the help so far!

[aaronchan]

I prefer most of your products will be hung up on their wall, so I would think a day light with a tungsten mixture lighting will get on the prints. In this case, using D50 would be absolutely fine when you produce your ICC profile.

I haven't use the Spyder 3 Print calibration kit for almost like a year so I can't judge about it. Since I use most of the X-Rite product and I do have used the Munki for my clients before, I think the Munki has a very nice engine for the printer and the monitor profile. As we, Chinese, said, One Stone Two Birds.

[tony22]

Philip, I own the Spyder3Print SR. I agree this is a great site, but if you also go to the dpreview Printers forum you can do a search and find a lot of information about the S3P SR. The S3P is a good device, but IMO you have to be willing to work with its profile editor to get something better than what comes out of the straight profiling process. Fortunately the editor is quite good. If you're like me, though, you will burn up a lot of paper after starting to edit the initial profile, to where you may be satisfied.

I haven't given up on the S3P, but I was lucky ( ) enough to find a new i1Photo LT at a great price. I thought I'd get the upgrade modules I wanted and then use that for paper profiling. Unfortunately in my case it doesn't look like that will work out (at least through X-Rite, but that's another story).

[philipkenney]

Thanks for the advice on the Spyder. I have heard mixed things about it from manydifferent sources. It seems it depends a lot on your expectations and quality standards. I will definitelyrethink the i1pro.

Color management is something new to me in terms of printing. All I know is that I have been using a lab for prints with dissatisfactory results for quite sometime. I'm finally putting money and effort aside to tackling this side of the workflow. Thanks for the replies. I think I have a good action plan from here although I'm sure I'll have more questions as I go.

[Jalok]

Colorvision/Datacolor software has an old not yet solved problem regarding to blue-purple shifting. Some printer/paper/ink combination seems to be more prone to it than other. Some people suggest preshifted targets as an workaround, but I tried it here with limited results. If you do landscapes, this problem gets worse. When I left Datacolor to X-Rite software (i1Match and then i1Profiler) this problem was gone immediately. Also, i1Profiler does a great job in generating profiles for different illuminants, something that S3P can't do. I always print using D50 profiles, but I remember doing a 3200K-profile printing beautifully compensated under an incandescent light. And like Tony22 said, X-Rite software tend to produce good profiles from the first attempt, while S3P needs finetuning frequently. I know i1Pro with RGB profiling may cost twice or even three times more than the S3P, but it's a (much) more durable device. My Datacolor spectrocolorimeter reached three years of usage with bad scannings at shadows. I could trace the beginning of this problem back to the 2nd year after purchasing.