is it a crappy profile or am i out of gamut in some way?
There are two major aspects of a profile that matters. How accurate it is printing in-gamut colors, and how it handles out-of-gamut colors. A profile can be very accurate printing in gamut yet handles out-of-gamut colors poorly and these can be in any image. Even when an image is in sRGB! This is why soft proofing is always a good idea.
Referring to the image with the fish against a blue tarp and circles along the bottom. If the image is in ProPhoto RGB, which is necessary to print strong, but in gamut colors, that are outside Adobe RGB, that image is Andrew's printer gamut test image. It's particularly useful for testing banding effects from gradients that are outside a printer's gamut. This can be important because all RGB colorspaces contain values that aren't printable. Even the narrow sRGB space has such colors.
An image such as Kodak's PDI image which is in Adobe RGB will produce good prints with an "accurate" profile using Rel. Col. w BPC because most all of the image is within gamut for glossy/semi-gloss type papers. However, it will tell nothing about how well the profile will deal with out-of-gamut images and these can be problematic. Especially when printing highly saturated gradients that exceed the printer's capability. Because of this my preference to quickly checking a printer is to print both Andrew's image and Kodak's Photodisc image which mostly contains in gamut colors.
The best suggestion for people w/o spectrophotometers which can measure and determine accuracy, but who have a ColorChecker card, is printing one of BabelColor's Colorchecker images using Photoshop and Abs. Col. intent. The print should visually closely match an actual Colorchecker*. This is one of the few, good, reasons for using Abs. Col. which is generally a poor choice for normal printing. However, this test says nothing about how a profile handles out-of-gamut colors. OTOH, a profile that does a good job printing a Colorchecker image is highly likely to produce good soft proof results so you can depend on the soft proof for avoiding or mitigating printing out of gamut colors.
* There are other complications from different illuminants that can mess this up even with an "accurate" profile. Profile can be generated using M0, M1, or M2 which have different levels of uV but otherwise use D50. This can cause Colorchecker prints on high OBA paper to vary a lot depending on the "M" and whether they are viewed in daylight or not. The best way to minimize this is using print paper that isn't heavy on OBAs and non-OBA paper will avoid the problem altogether regardless of what "M" the profile was made with. Some secondary effects can be present too such as metameric error from illuminants that differ from daylight. Luckily, these are usually much smaller than OBA related differences.
Andrew also has a business that makes/sells custom profiles. He is one of a small handful of true experts (in a practical, real world sense) in this field and he uses top of the line equipment.
Sorry for going into the weeds. I realize this can seem quite intimidatingly complex. I highly recommend viewing Andrew's video's on color management. They are highly accessible without too much jargon. More technical info can be had from the various papers linked on
www.color.org which is the official site of the ICC.
