A Visual Examination of Printer Manages Color - Oh My!

[digitaldog]

I would be interested to hear more about you technical experience with stress-testing printers. What methodologies have you used to do this work?
Have you deployed objective testing procedures or have you witnessed how photographers' taste in colour defies their printers, and if the latter, which photographers may I ask?
Or are you speaking for yourself stress testing your All-in-One with prints from Costco?

Good questions! Along with those asked in post #55.

When someone says, That's a good question. You can be sure it's a lot better than the answer you're going to get. -Source Unknown

[Tim Lookingbill]

I would be interested to hear more about you technical experience with stress-testing printers.

The many photographic inkjet prints on a number of paper and metal surfaces I've inspected at my local art gallery tells me this technology is similar to handing scissors to children and telling them to go play on the freeway of color fidelity. Lots of clipped color detail in the name of "art". I doubt any of them had ever heard of the term "Soft Proofing", but from the garish colors I also doubt even if they did employ it, it wouldn't have made an improvement.

My "Printer Manages Color" prints off my Epson "All In One" and those printed from Walmart in sRGB were much better and didn't use Soft Proofing. But those were of scenes that didn't require cranking up the saturation on warm colors to depict for example a western scene of a wagon train with a team of horses at sunset. The most valued and expensive component of these gallery prints I saw was the amount of ink laid out.

So much for the "pin head dance" on this subject.

[Mark D Segal]

"Inspected"? OK zero relevant experience. And disparaging the whole subject by dismissing it as a "pin head dance" doesn't change that, or the view of others here with significant experience that the factors being discussed mean something and have practical consequences.

[digitaldog]

"Inspected"? OK zero relevant experience. And disparaging the whole subject by dismissing it as a "pin head dance" doesn't change that, or the view of others here with significant experience that the factors being discussed mean something and have practical consequences.

If you’ve only imagined it, you haven’t experienced it; yeah, virtually no experience from someone with a habit of posting incorrect concepts. Evidence to ignore!

[Mark D Segal]

............ Evidence to ignore!

What "evidence" is there to ignore? None of those observations at his local art gallery or from his Epson All-In-One, which I do not doubt Tim observed as he reported, have a bearing on the technical aspects of the discussion. Doug Gray started this thread making some technical observations that deserve to be explored and discussed at that level.

[digitaldog]

What "evidence" is there to ignore?

Evidence that someone here, with no experience in testing this subject, on an imaginary all-in-one undefined printer, should be ignored. 

None of those observations at his local art gallery or from his Epson All-In-One, which I do not doubt Tim observed as he reported, have a bearing on the technical aspects of the discussion.

We are in violent agreement, hence his so called observations (to be so kind) should be ignored.

[eronald]

I'm not sure the sort of changes some people might apply to an image to make it attractive ("make it pop") fall into the typical expectation of "perceptual" or even "saturation". "Artistic" might be closer to the mark.
But I tend to see it as a clash of traditions - the ICC tradition is founded on measurements and color accuracy, with perceptual/saturation mappings based on cLUTs and the idea of gamut mapping, while the other tradition is based on hand tuned curves and other algorithmic or manual tweaks made on the basis of visual assessment or per channel type measurements such as density, with the explicit goal of making images "look good".

Graeme,

 ICC tradition is made for printing eg. magazines where a whole batch of images should be gamut-mappped consistently. In fine art printing it is reasonable to use adaptive gamut mapping. Klaus Karcher wrote a droplet which implements this with Argyll.

Edmund