Hard to judge just by looking at your photos of your actual target, but it looks as if you are generating the color patches the same way IT8 targets are made.
If so, then that's a deal breaker. The color patches would be made of dyes generated by wet process (RA-4) chemistry. The cyan, magenta, yellow layers are stacked in three layers to form the colors, and there will be lots of color constancy (metameric mismatches) between how the camera records those colors and how the camera records real world spectra. A camera target is a different application all together from the use of IT8 targets to profile scanners for scanning film or color prints. IT8 targets are "training" the scanner to look at the very same dyes which will be scanned during the reproduction, i.e., either wet process color prints or color transparency films. It's why a different IT8 target is ideally required for every film type, definitely Kodachrome versus EktaChrome, because the color dyes are so spectrally different between those two film types.
The 24 patch Macbeth color checker chart uses specially formulated color pigments designed to precisely mimic real world color spectra (e.g., skin tones, blue skies, green foliage, etc), and this technical achievement by C.S. McCamy, et al, back in 1976 is a critical reason why the Macbeth Colorchecker chart functions as well as it does for digital camera profiling in the digital age.
The chart is printed in an Epson inkjet plotter, not by chemical process. Chemical process is being removed everywhere. For printing color charts, chemical process presents many variables and it's hard to keep constancy. Inkjet is much more adequate, and it offers a wide gamut.
There's not a big difference between how the spectra is mixed in a chemical paper and inkjet print, because in chemical, dyes are layed one over another, while in an inkjet, pigments are placed one beside another.
I've read many times about the argument that the spectra of the real world vs the pigments but for this chart is not an issue, because:
- It's aimed for art reproduction, which uses systhetic pigments, just like inkjet.
- it's aimed for product photography, which (except food) is always printed used synthetic pigments. Cloths, packaging... all use these pigments.
But, anyway, I've tested in real world, landscape and it gives extraordinary results. Ornitologhists, i.e. had told me that photos profiled with the Superchrome are the best they've seen, ever. And birds use natural pigments, of course.
Regarding the CC classic, I know it very well; In fact I have 5-6 in almost all versions.
I've read babelcolor site and I'm also in contact with Danny pascale, the man behind Babelcolor. In fact, he helped me in some stages of the development.
Yes, Macbeth developed pigments that are similar to the real world, back in 1976, which is more than 40 years ago. Since then, there's a company in Japan that had invested zillions of Yens to improve their pigment formulation: Seiko-Epson.
Don't you think that with the money they invested in research (which I guess we all agree that is WAY more than what Macbeth invested 40 yrs ago) they achieved extraordinary pigments with excellent spectra nowadays?
the main problem with CC is that it only has 24 different patches (actually only 18 in color). I've used it for camera profiling and while with skin and some low saturation color works well, with highly saturated or difficult colors, the results are far from perfect.
