Greetings!
I'm trying to help out a local shop with their fine art reproduction setup. They seem to have purchased it as a kit from an integrator about 8-10 years ago. It consists of a Phase One P30 back, mamiya camera body, 80mm lens, pro photo strobes with soft boxes, a power Mac running os x 10.4, Capture One 4.x, and PhotoShop CS2. For some reason they have a 24 patch color checker chart but don't seem to have any camera profiling software. They print to an Epson 44" UltraChrome K3 based printer (I forget the exact model). Other than the lack of camera profiling this seems like a respectable setup even with its age.
The guy who previously did their fine art reproduction seems to have been doing color management manually in his head and not surprisingly nobody there understood any of the magic formulae he tried to communicate before he left.
I'm a bit frustrated with the fact that they're using older versions of software than what I'm familiar with, and the lack of automated color management in this situation. (I've taken my own photos, processed, and printed them but never tried to precisely replicate an existing piece of artwork until now.) Fortunately they do have tools to calibrate the monitor and the printer, but my biggest problem is matching the original to the print, not the screen to the printer.
Some questions:
1) I tried creating a profile with the color checker camera calibration application only to remember after doing so that it only creates DNG profiles and CaptureOne (even the latest version I think) requires its own sort of ICC camera profile. Short of dealing with stuff like Argyll CMS and DCamProf, is there anything I can do to profile the camera/lighting setup for C1 without recommending purchasing additional software? If I did recommend camera profiling software, what would it be and would it run on an old PowerPC based Mac? Should I even worry about this or just use the P30 Flash profile that comes with C1?
2) When using C1, I'm unsure if I should use the Film Standard or Linear response curve. One seems to result in too much saturation/contrast and the other too little.
3) I also attempted to export an image from C1 in DNG format but the version of ACR on the system wouldn't let me select a DNG profile other than the embedded profile
4) if this color checker chart is 8+ years old, does it need replacement anyway?
5) Can anyone point me to any fine art reproduction tutorials or information using similar setups?
6) What is realistically achievable here according to the limits of technology? For example, if I have a watercolor on off-white paper am I ever going to be able to match the off white color of the paper with an ink jet printer?
I hesitate to suggest too many upgrades or additional purchases because they aren't servicing too much demand in this area at the moment. (Most of their businesses is printing large jobs on oversized paper, rigid media, decals, etc, using a variety of large and specialized digital printing equipment.) I don't think the owner is totally adverse to upgrading software and such if it will help increase efficiency and get this part of the business back on track, but I certainly don't want to suggest anything that won't be useful.
Any advice anyone could offer would be extremely appreciated. I thought I had learned some stuff about color management but trying to match an original artwork to printer output is exceedingly difficult (and not possible to do perfectly under all lighting conditions due to metemerism anyway).