Hi folks
I come here once every few years it seems, and this time I'm trying to chase down a mystery with a group of profiles.
I recently paid a top-tier company to make custom profiles for me. I used PrintTool to print their target without Colorsync, Adobe or Epson messing with it. (The printer is a 9890.)
What happens with only these profiles, and it's across all of them, is this: 1) there is a color change in the cyan, and more obviously, 2) printed using Relative Colormetric (RC) intent, I get a banding of colors, some of which is quite obvious.
With perceptual, everything looks fine. Yes: I understand the difference between the two, and that's obviously in play here. The question is -why?-
I've switched between RC and percp tens of thousands of time over the years, using Epson profiles; my own profiles; paper mfgrs profiles, and I've never seen anything like this.
(My test image is the one with the clock in the upper left, and the sandbar in the lower right; strawberrys, yellow flowers, and the arches in the southwest. The pattern I see this in is at the bottom of the second column of images.)
I've uploaded a scan of the printouts, using the paid profile, an Epson profile and my own ColorMunki profile, all printed using RC intent. Epson and mine look as I've always seen; the paid one is out of whack.
I've dropped the profile into ColorThink, and it appears fine to me (although I could be missing something. I'm not a ColorThink expert.)
Now I've ordered an Xrite i1Photo Pro spectrophotometer to bump up my own quality level from the ColorMunki... and because I'm so puzzled by this, as is the provider of the paid profile. Someone in the QTR group on Yahoo suggested I come over here to see if anyone can explain why I'm seeing this only on these particular profiles, and have never seen it before.
I've attached the sample scan of the prints. It is also here: http://cl.ly/image/1o0e3O2r1t0L
Note the different color on column A & B; the "banding" in C but also in the magenta next to B and red next to D.
Here is the profile, if you'd like to see it: http://dlsi.biz/fc/Ep9890_EpPrmLustr.zip
If anyone here would care to take a moment to look at this, and enlighten me, I'd sure appreciate knowing what's going on.
Yosemite 10.10.3; 32 GB RAM; Photoshop CC (2014); PrintTool.
Thank you.
Tracy Valleau
www.valleau.gallery