Hello Torger,
How good would DCamProf be for artwork reproduction?
I used to use inCamera from Pictocolor. It was a hit and miss....
DCamProf is primarily designed with general-purpose photography in mind, and therefore it makes 2.5D profiles when it comes to the colorimetric part, ie exposure-independent. I suspect that in some art reproduction cases a full 3D profile is preferable. I think DCamProf does a very good job for general-purpose photography and adapting the tone reproduction for a curve (which you need in that case). I've studied this case at length, but art reproduction is not my area of expertise.
That said I don't doubt it will do a pretty good job, within the 2.5D limitation. For high end results you probably need to make a custom target which uses the same type of colorants as the artwork you're copying. If lightness is controlled with spectrally flat white/black additives the 2.5D limitation won't hurt.
On this forum I think Iliah Borg is one of the more knowledgeable when it comes to art reproduction if you want profiling tech deep dive.
Doug is right that a custom target can be worthwhile, but you don't need to know the "pipeline" as you profile the whole system, you just need to make sure that you profile with the same gear setup (lens, lights, exposure) as you use when shooting. Making really high end profiles is quite difficult and is a bit of an art, but if you master it you can surely improve on the bundled "bespoke" profiles in CH8, as their profiles still have to be made with some sort of generic target(s).
I'm not sure it's necessary though, it depends on the customer. Actually it would be interesting to test how a CC24 target-based profile would perform in comparison with for example CH8 bundled profiles or a target-specific one. With DCamProf you can do these tests virtually using SSFs. When I've done that type of tests before with various reference data (real human skin, colors from nature etc) it's been shown that it's hard to improve on the CC24 with other generic targets (except for really high saturation colors), you typically need to be spot on with the test target to make meaningful improvements. That is I think a simple CC24-based profile could work for "simpler" work, and for advanced customer work (museums) you might need to do the hard way and actually make a custom target using the same materials as the specific artwork is made of. When LUT smoothing is added on top the results will even out a bit. This is speculation though, as said artwork repro is not my area of expertise.
I assume CH8 out-of-the-box is good enough for most applications though, Doug can probably provide some excellent references.
