I am just starting to try my hand at printer profiling using an i1 Pro2. For my first attempts, and to make sure I am doing things correctly, I would like to try to reproduce (and hopefully improve upon) the 'canned' profiles from a few third party paper makers. Is it safe to assume that if the profile from, say, Hahnemuhle calls for a media choice of Heavyweight Fine Art in the Canon driver, that Heavyweight Fine Art would be the best media to profile, as opposed to starting from the question of which media setting to use? Also, any good references to be had about how to choose the best media setting if, say, I wanted to try profiling some Epson papers for a Canon printer where no media choices or profiles are available. I would love to see some examples beyond choose the one that looks best or closest to the target if possible.
Thanks.
Howard
A number of things here:
(1) The best guidance on Media Type selection for printing your profiling targets is the Media Type that the paper manufacturer uses for its own profiles for the printer/paper combination at hand - and they tell you what it is, either abbreviated in the profile name or in the information sheet accompanying the profile or both. The most important point here is that once you select this Media Type in the printer driver for printing your profiling targets, always use that same Media Type setting when you make prints using that profile.
(2) I presume you are using i1Profiler software for making the profiles. As X-Rite has never seen fit to produce a manual accompanying this application (a huge act of commercial and professional irresponsibility) and as there are no third party manuals on the market, and given the very poor design quality of the i1Profiler user interface, using this application to optimize your profiles can be challenging. So a few key things to watch out for.
(a)
The operating mode: select the "Advanced" radio button in the lower right of the Home page to open up all the options that make using this application worthwhile.
(b)
Patch set: While one can get away with a small number of patches and make an adequate profile, you'll be more assured of more accurate results using a target of at least 1600 patches. Some practitioners recommend as many as 2200 or more, but I have found 1600 works very well. Remember, the larger the target the more measuring you will be doing.
(c)
Create and save workflows: For every different set of conditions you profile, create and save the workflow before you proceed to make the profile. This is partly for the convenience of future reference, but more importantly, i1Profiler is a buggy application that can quit on you at the most inconvenient moments losing everything. If you save the workflow as you go along, you can revert to the read data without having to rescan it. These are little things one learns the hard way - take my word for it; done a lot of this.
(d)
Beware of the "M" Factor: The M factor deals with differences of profiling based on whether or not the paper contains OBAs (Optical Brightening Agents) or FWAs (same thing) - chemicals added to the paper that make it fluoresce producing brighter looking whites. If you know the paper contains OBAs (it likely will unless the manufacturer states unequivocally that it does not) you will want to profile under M0 and/or M1 conditions. If you are certain the paper does not contain OBAs, you can safely use the M2 condition. As long as you suspect there may be OBAs, you should do your target scanning in dual scan mode and save the workflow. In this scan mode, it will save the data for all three M conditions at once. Once you have completed measuring and you are at the Profile making tab, you can successively create three profiles from the same set of data by going back to the Measurement tab, selecting another M factor, then revert to the Profile making tab and regenerate a new profile based on the selected M factor. Make sure to give each profile a separate name that states the M factor in the name, so you will know which is which. Then to test, make a test print from each of the three profiles to see which you think best reproduces your photos.
With careful attention to detail in the workflow, you can make profiles that will surpass OEM profiles for accuracy, simply because you are characterizing the specific behaviour of your printer in your working environment. Notwithstanding the many rough edges with i1Profiler, the combination of this software and the i1Pro2 instrument can produce very high quality results.