I built color and b&w profiles for my Canon Pro-100, using Doug Gray's patch generators and following his recommendations. The results were good, and I thought I now had conquered the profiling world.
My photographer neighbor has a Canon Pro-9000 Mkii, and armed with all of my expertise I created a black and white profile for one of his papers, Red River Palo Duro Satin - the results were kindly stated inferior, a definite green tint thru the mid-tones and shadows. We spent hours looking at his setup, printing targets, etc., with no luck. Finally I remembered one of Doug's posts having to do with increasing the smoothness control when using targets consisting mostly of neutrals/near neutrals and few colors. That did the trick, with smoothness set to 80 the results were satisfactory. The attachment is a comparison of the before (left) and after (right) profiles neutral curves, the only difference is the smoothness control increased from 50 to 80. It's clear that upping the smoothness took down the green channel and raised the red.
We went back and used a profile I had done earlier for his printer and the same paper, for full color. Upon closer examination we noticed it also printed slightly green in the shadows, although not as bad as my initial attempt on b&w. Again re-profiling with the smoothness set to 80 much improved the neutral response, although not sure yet what it did to color accuracy. The 9000 mkii has a single black, where my Pro-100 has black-gray-light gray, I'm assuming this to be a factor in achieving good neutrals in their profiles.
About all I can conclude is be ready to up the smoothness for profiles with questionable neutral performance. All X-rite states in their help is that 50 should usually do the trick, higher values trade-off accuracy for "smoothness", however that manifests itself. I read some earlier posts in LULA, not a whole lot of wisdom to be gained. Anybody have a catalog of printers for which the smoothness adjustment is needed?
Richard Southworth
Added by edit - For what it's worth both printers are dye type.