Can anyone advise on Argyll printer target for Canon Pro9000MkII?

[tony22]

So I've decided to try Argyll with my i1Pro. I've read through the various web pages and also decided to use the Argyll CMS GUI front end, which at least has all of the various oprtions oarganized so I don't forget anything.

I was looking at the printer target generator and its options. Since I use a Pro9000 Mark II, Argyll does not have an exact match for the -d option (Target Colorant Type). The two nearest options are CMYK+Light CM, or CMYK+Orange+Green+LightCM. The question is whether the latter will throw things off since the Pro9000 uses a Red (not Orange) cart.

[PhilipCummins]

I was pretty sure the Canon Pro9000mk2 was a RGB printer (not CMYK) so you should use the standard Print RGB colorant?

[Alan Goldhammer]

This is an RGB printer so you need to use the setting for that.  Also, I do not believe that there is a GUI front end for printer profiling only for monitor profiling so you will have to use the command line on you computer to profile it.  You would use the following setting for target generation:  targen –v –d2 –G –g128  –f[# patches to be read] PrinterA  'g' gives you a 128 step white to black wedge which is very helpful in characterizing the printer.  Depending on how many patches you want to read you would set the 'f' switch to that number.  For my Epson 3880, I print out four full letter size pages to read with an i1 pro (1848 patches).  I've found that this results in profiles that are quite good.

[tony22]

Thanks guys. I read and rerad the Argyll web pages and also serached again through the mailing list. Thanks for the correction on RGB. I got confused (and maybe got my hopes up!) that I could do an initial "tuning" of the target parameters by ink colors. No big deal. I also read through this

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=53408.0

which I had read through before, and got depressed. Honestly was not looking forward to burning through paper with the tweaking of profiles. I did that with my Spyder3Print SR. Even though it (like i1Match, PMP, and i1Profiler) is supposed to be an "expert" system, I was never happy with the initial profile. Always wound up going through at least 10-12 additional tweaks before I was happy with the result.

Alan, I'm hoping your initial target recommendation with the additional gray scale patches will get me closer than with S3P. I was looking at Iliah's method ( http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=53408.msg436947#msg436947 ) but wasn't sure I understood it all. I'll try your way first.

BTW Alan, there is a printer-capable GUI for Argyll, found here http://www.digifab.com/ArgyllCMSGUI/ , but the printer profiling interface does not seem to work very well. Either that or I couldn't figure it out.