Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Colour Management => Topic started by: Wayne Fox on March 27, 2012, 01:54:49 pm
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So I'm remaking most of my profiles. My current ones were all built with PM5, now I'm using i1profiler with the iSis. Anyone have any good tips on the best settings for the perceptual intent choices when creating the profile? Are the two defaults similar to other settings such as PM5 Logo Colorful? Any tips or links to articles appreciated.
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The older settings (Colorful for example) are not identical since the entire engine is new (and better). But they are a good start. Depending on how much you want to futz around, you may be frustrated to find that with all the sliders, and the huge granulites values they provide, they don’t do that much. I’ve argued with X-Rite (among others) that IF you supply a slider with a scale that goes from 1 to 100, I expect to measure, let alone see a difference between a value of 1 and a value of 5 or 10. Not the case here. Begging the question, why not make the slider go from 1 to 10?
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why not make the slider go from 1 to 10?
Ever seen Spinal Tap ? ;-)
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Thanks Andrew. I was hoping you would offer some advice.
I re-read your article yesterday, noting where you had discussed the issues of the sliders, so that prompted the question. Glad to confirm the presets are a good place to start.
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Thanks Andrew. I was hoping you would offer some advice.
I re-read your article yesterday, noting where you had discussed the issues of the sliders, so that prompted the question. Glad to confirm the presets are a good place to start.
Could you please tell me what's the preset for perceptual rendering settings at profile settings panel? Here when it's loaded for the first time I have 0 values for all the 3 parameters: contrast, saturation and neutralize gray. It's the same as clicking Load and select default.sxf. But when re-select Custom, i1Profiler gives me 0, 0, 50 for those parameters. Which one is default?
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Could you please tell me what's the preset for perceptual rendering settings at profile settings panel? Here when it's loaded for the first time I have 0 values for all the 3 parameters: contrast, saturation and neutralize gray. It's the same as clicking Load and select default.sxf. But when re-select Custom, i1Profiler gives me 0, 0, 50 for those parameters. Which one is default?
For Perceptual, there are two presets in the popup menu (so two defaults) or anything different which come up as custom.
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For Perceptual, there are two presets in the popup menu (so two defaults) or anything different which come up as custom.
There're also two custom settings. When loaded, the Profile Settings page shows 0 for Neutralize Grays. When click on Custom and re-select it, this parameter changes to 50. I suspect this (50) is the value intended to be custom one, since it's suggested at help's column. If that's true, I don't understand why X-Rite fixed other values into default.sxf file.
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There're also two custom settings. When loaded, the Profile Settings page shows 0 for Neutralize Grays. When click on Custom and re-select it, this parameter changes to 50. I suspect this (50) is the value intended to be custom one, since it's suggested at help's column. If that's true, I don't understand why X-Rite fixed other values into default.sxf file.
There is much to misunderstand about certain settings and the programming mindset in i1Profiler!
Why for example do they love the 400 patch set? EVERYTIME you move into that workflow, it is set for you instead of your last used settings. There are simply dozens of similar oddities in the application like this. While I think the end results of the product are very good, I am continuously reminded that the methodology used to code this product seems to be done by people who’ve never really used the product in any kind of production environment.
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Wayne - If you are out to emulate PMP output, particularly Logo Colorful, that's difficult. The guts of i1Profiler are the MonacoProfiler engine mated to the PMP front-end and its ability to take arbitrary targets. Add a bit of ColorMunki to the mix if you really feel like printing inadequately small initial targets, generating an optimization target, and re-profiling.
In any event, for RGB profiles a heavy hand on the saturation slider gets you closer to Logo Colorful except in hadnilg of red (always less saturated) and yellow (prints as yellow rather than GretagMacbeth greenish-ugly). Softproofing the results against smooth gradients and a Grainger Rainbow shows when you have gone too far without the need to print a stack of paper.
We shoved some hundreds of profiles through i1Profiler before giving up. As Andrew says, it's a mess if you are working with more than a handful of profiles. A basic workflow we established is the following:
- Make a measurement of your most common chart, setting the printer and paper information to something sensible. Save the data in the default location as a mxf file
- Save the lighting and profile settings you typically use. Given that i1Profiler displays all this crap in the left panel, it behoves you to not get too carried away with making presets.
- If you are making profiles for multiple printers, you'll want to make good use of the Hot Folders for storing profiles. Unfortunately you need to define a folder for everything - there's no option to save a profile to a location of your choosing that won't be added to the hot folder list.
- When you start a profiling session, go immediately to the measurement tab and load your saved data set. This presets much of the needed info
- For other chart types, skip back to the Test Chart pane and load the necessary chart then skip forward to measurements and measure away.
- Save the measurement, skip forward to load lighting (if not using D50) and your saved profile settings, and finally build a profile.
- If, like us, you sometimes find it necessary to compare measurements in MeasureTool save your data in CGATS format. Sorry, but I can find no advantage to i1Profiler's profusion of new file formats, including the measurement mxf one. To load i1Profiler data into MeasureTool you need to delete every occurrence of SPECTRAL_ in the files. Otherwise, they are straight CGATS. If data file comparison and averaging is important to you, modifying the i1Profiler executable to change the default format is trivial. Of course as this violates the EULA, I don't know anything about it.