In a single printing pass, create and verify accuracy of one or more ICC profiles from one or more sets of RGB profiling patches.
i1Patches Is a Windows based tool principally used to aggregate and randomize one or more, printer profiling patch sets along with randomly generated patches for independent accuracy verification. It produces tif and CGATs files compatible with XRite's i1Profiler and i1iSis or i1Pro2 spectrophotometers.
It is particularly good at removing externalities that strongly affect comparing different profile patch sets. These have been typically evaluated by printing charts, measuring patch color, making profiles, printing sets of known colors with these profiles, and finally, measuring these prints and comparing measured colors to patch RGB value colors.
The following can, and does, make this usual practice difficult and uncertain: I've seen these effects result in a 500 patch profile appearing to be more accurate than an 1,800 patch profile.
1. Environmental variations such as changes in temperature and humidity that change the dynamics of dot size as ink drys.
2. Printer variations that occur between successive page prints from warmup. Inking differences as new ink flows out of cartridges, through supply tubes, and into the print head.
3. Print head technology. Canon and Epson heads differ and have different drift characteristics through a print job.
4. Printer algorithms. An example is when the printer decides it's time to jiggle the inks partway through a print job. I've noticed on the Canon Pro1000.
5. Paper characteristic changes. Each page may not ink the exact same way due to manufacturing or storage variation. For example the first page in a paper package can exhibit significant shifts on papers with high OBA levels due to more air exposure.
The program also includes many features for manipulating CGATs RGB and Measurement files
See this for details:
https://github.com/doug3236/i1PatchesHere's a summary of data comparing dE accuracy for 5 different profiles. This was made from a single print run of 12 pages. The numbers after the first letter of the ICC profile is the number of patches in that profile.
Device Neutrals Low Saturation Full Gamut
dE76 dE2k dE76 dE2k dE76 dE2k
0.40 0.38 0.64 0.49 0.84 0.47 p581_m2.icm
0.32 0.31 0.56 0.43 0.73 0.41 p1105_m2.icm
0.45 0.44 0.49 0.38 0.63 0.36 p2371_m2.icm
0.42 0.42 0.44 0.33 0.58 0.33 p4357_m2.icm
0.44 0.43 0.54 0.41 0.70 0.40 o957_m2.icm