I recently resumed making my own print profiles after purchasing the X-Rite i1 Photo Pro package (i1Pro 2, i1Profiler with everything except CMYK). Basically everything works in that I can create and print patch sets, read the targets with the i1Pro 2 and create a profile. To keep things simple to start with I am not trying to do anything with UV. So it's just the M0 measurement data that I am using.
To validate the new profiles I am using a couple of color reference images from DigitalDog.net. Using the new profile I printed both of these images from Lightroom with both Perceptual and Relative rendering intents. The results of this was that I am seeing much less banding especially with saturated red/magenta and green/cyan areas of the test prints. So far so good especially since I do a lot of landscape with saturated sunsets and green trees.
Now to the part where I think I found a problem with profiles I made, with a profile from Canson for Platine Rag on the P600 (and maybe all profiles made by i1Profiler?). Before I continue I want to say I am not a CMS expert. I am simply a reasonably competent computer guy/photographer that is comfortable running complex software with sufficient guidance/documentation.
This is what is describe below and it produced an anomaly which I am completely at a loss to explain. So I decided to being it to the "colorati" here to see if you guy have any insights about the effects I am seeing and to what extent they do or do not represent a problem with the profile or if it is really a problem with the test itself.
So to continue, in my quest to learn more I discovered an interesting YouTube video produced by Pat Herold over at Chromix titled
Viewing a Rendered Gamut. This is basically a torture test of a profile using ColorThink Pro to plot out in 3D how well the output profile maps out of gamut colors back to the gamut of the output device. So this sounds cool and I tried it with my newly minted profiles.
When examining the resulting plot of the colors mapped to the output space there are big holes in the saturated reds and saturated yellow. For some strange reason these seem to be plotted way into the interior of the gamut.
I will attempt to attach an image one of these plots. If I am unsuccessful you also see a good example from a blog post by Pat titled
ColorThink to the rescue!.
I will add that this anomaly is worst when you assign a wide gamut space to the color list and completely disappears when you assign Adobe RGB to the color list.
So I have several questions
What is going on?
Is this anomaly indicative of other problems with the profile?