Printer icc profiles - be tweaked?

[rick_k]

I had a couple of different ICC profiles made for my printer/paper combination and I have printed out test images using the different profiles that have a black patch ( 2 - 24) and white patch (254 - 243) scale section in the test image. I'm wondering after printing:

1. where in the black and white scales I should expect to be able to distinguish the patches?
2. if I bias the print driver for brightness should I favor the whites or the blacks?
3. is there a way to tweak the profiles to get more darks patches without losing the white patches?

Here is what I am able to see with the various profiles after printing

G: Blacks 10-12, Whites 252-253
51: Blacks 10-12, Whites 252-253
X: Blacks 8-10, Whites 250-251
C: Blacks, 10+-, Whites 251- 252

If I adjust the brightness of the printer module to see more blacks, then I lose the white patches and the colors seem to get lighter, and less saturated so I'm not really happy about doing that either.

It seems like this may just be the range of the printer and paper combination and it is what it is.


Thanks for any advice.

Rick

[Tony Jay]

At the risk of exposing my own ignorance I am not sure what you are driving at.

Surely the ICC profiles already made are optimised for your printer/paper combination.
Why would you want to tweak how the colour targets now look?
Surely one uses the already generated ICC profiles to softproof an image (not a colour target).

It is possible that the ICC profiles have been poorly made and so do not deliver very good results.

Possibly others will shed light on whether you are asking the correct questions and perhaps give the answer for the question that is really mean't but not actually expressed.

Collectively the forum membership has more than enough experience and expertise, but I know that am a bit mystified by the question.

Good luck

Tony Jay

[Scott Martin]

Generally speaking, profile editing should be discouraged. If you're seeing results that don't seem right, it's better to focus on what went wrong during the profiling process and work towards making a better profile. Work on doing it right without any trickery.

As to shadow and highlight detail, it's common to not be able to visually discern some of the extreme values that the spectro can. This increases with dynamic range - so papers with particularly rich DMax values make it harder for us to visually make out extreme shadow detail relative to papers with modest DMax values. So it becomes important to differentiate between color management with ICC profiles and print specific *color correction* which is what I suspect you may need to do to get the final look you seek.

[Ethan_Hansen]

Rick,

To continue Scott's point, profile editing can be useful, but requires a fair amount of skill to avoid introducing more problems than you solve. Based on your description, I would start with the printer settings used for printing the profiling targets. Experiment with both driver and paper type settings to see which gives the best shadow and highlight resolution on prints made without color management or profiles enabled. I recommend erring on the side of holding highlight detail, as careful profiling can tease out shadow details more easily than recover highlights driven to paper white. Once optimize the raw output, it's time to build the profiles.

[Scott Martin]

Well said Ethan. Rick, perhaps if you told us what printer, papers and media settings you were using we'd better understand were you're coming from.

[Rhossydd]

It seems like this may just be the range of the printer and paper combination and it is what it is.

To get back to the original question. Yes, it is what is.
The values you've posted are about right for most papers. I've never seen a paper/ink/printer combination yet where you can see every shade of tone from 0-255.

If I adjust the brightness of the printer module to see more blacks, then I lose the white patches and the colors seem to get lighter, and less saturated so I'm not really happy about doing that either.

Again, that suggests the profiles are likely to be correct. The print adjustment sliders (I assume you're using Lightroom 4 ?) just change the image data coming out of the program, not the profile or printer's output itself.