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Home > Commerce > Business Articles > Custom Profiles for RGB Printers

ColorVision’s PrintFIX PRO - Custom Profiles for RGB Printers

A review by John Blaustein

If the news item about ColorVision’s PrintFIX PRO hardware/software package caught your eye in the Winter 2006 issue of the ASMP Bulletin, you may also be interested in this extensive product review, written by one of the beta testers.

A photographer peers through the viewfinder of a camera, evaluates the light and composition and presses the shutter release. An image is captured. A lot has changed over the years in what happens after that.

If you are old enough to remember what it was like to have color prints made in the pre-digital age, you’ll recall the routine: If you shot color negative film, you’d view contact sheets that weren’t supposed to be even close to the “real color” you’d expect in a final print. You would try to describe to the lab what the image should look like on paper. If you shot color transparency film and did an adequate job at the time of exposure, you would tell the lab to “match the chrome” and hope for the best. In both cases, you would rely on a person at the lab (who, in all likelihood, you would not be able to speak with directly) to interpret your image and make the print.

Now that we have the capability to fine-tune and adjust our images, we can print them ourselves with the full and reasonable expectation that our prints will be exactly as we imagine they should look. Whether an image is created on film that is scanned or captured directly as a digital file, photographers can view an image on their computer monitor, adjust the color exactly how they want it, click the Print button, and minutes later have a full-color, museum quality, archival print in their hands.

Yet in spite of all the time we take to fine-tune an image on-screen, how often does the print we make match what we see on screen? How often are we disappointed to see that what we saw on the screen didn’t translate properly onto the paper? Color management tools and software make it possible to avoid such disappointments.

What is color management? A good way to see what color management is all about is to walk into any electronics store that sells TVs. You will see a huge wall filled with dozens of different television sets, all displaying the same program. Each screen image looks different. Some will appear greener than others, some more red or magenta, some lighter and some darker. Which TV is displaying the image correctly? That’s hard to say. In fact, if you only look at one TV at a time, your eyes will adjust quickly and almost any of the screen images will look good.

While that’s generally acceptable for TVs, it’s the source of the problem for desktop photo printing. Every digital image file contains data describing the colors in the photograph. When the file is loaded into the editing software, the color data is read and translated into what we see on the screen — just like the TV program being displayed on the wall of TVs. The data going to all those TV’s is the same, yet what we see is different. That is exactly the case when an image is displayed on a computer monitor. There is no way to know if the color being displayed is accurate and true to the colors in the file.

Color Management to the Rescue

Using very simple-to-use hardware and software like ColorVision’s Spyder2PRO, it is now possible to calibrate a monitor so that it accurately displays the colors contained in the image file. While a monitor might come from the factory with a slightly green or magenta (or other) color shift, monitor calibrating hardware and software can correct for this so that colors are displayed in a neutral and accurate way. Once the calibrating software determines the corrections to be made, those are saved in a monitor profile and loaded whenever the computer is started. From that point on, the monitor will display the image file data correctly.

Using image-editing software, we adjust the color to our liking and then send the file to our printer. Just as the data was translated from the file to the screen, it is again translated from the screen to the print. Similarly, just as all of those TVs display color differently, all color printers do the same thing. Each combination of printer, ink and paper has a different set of characteristics and will print the same image data differently.

In order for a print to match what we see on the screen, a correct translation needs to occur. Just as a monitor’s color display can be adjusted with a profile, a printer’s color can be adjusted the same way so that prints from that printer — i.e., that print engine, ink and paper combination — will correctly reproduce what we see on the monitor.

(It’s important to remember that a monitor is transmitted light and a print is viewed with reflected light. In other words, a screen image and a print will, by definition, look different. That said, the goal is get them to look as close as possible.)

Every desktop printer comes with a CD containing a driver and profiles. The driver is the software that “translates” the image data from the adjusted image file to the printer. While the supplied profiles can work, they cannot be modified or fine-tuned to a photographer’s individual taste. In addition, many photographers like to print on non-standard papers for which there are no profiles. We are left to make a print-knowing full well it will not match what we see on our monitor, then go back and readjust the file so that the next print will (we hope) achieve the colors we wanted and saw on-screen in the first place. It’s a back and forth process that can take a lot of time and use up large amounts of ink and paper.

Enter PrintFIX PRO.

With the PrintFIX PRO hardware and software package, it is now possible to create specific, custom profiles for any printer, ink and paper combination. With these profiles, the image corrections made on-screen can now be accurately translated to the printer so that What We See is now actually What We Get — the fine-tuning we do to our image files to make them look perfect on screen will now appear on our prints.

PrintFIX PRO consists of a very easy-to-use software interface that walks the user through the entire profiling process. It also includes a hardware Spectrocolorimeter that actually reads colors directly off a print. It works like this: An opening screen asks you to specify the name and model of your printer, as well as which paper and ink you are using. Then, using the software, you print a target file — a “test pattern” of either 150, 225 or 729 small color patches. The software then clearly instructs you how to measure each color patch with the Spectrocolorimeter. Once it reads each patch, the data is saved in a unique measurement file, named for easy future identification. At that point, PrintFIX PRO builds a profile, interpreting the data it collected from the test pattern patches and adjusting the output colors accordingly. The profile is saved with a user-specified name in the correct location within the operating system (see details of system requirements below). Using settings available within the image-editing software, the user selects the profile for printing.

Although PrintFIX PRO offers the capability to edit or fine-tune a profile, it is usually not necessary. If desired, however, the user simply selects an existing measurement file, then uses a series of sliders to adjust brightness, saturation, contrast, color, etc., to build a custom profile. The program is so sophisticated that it allows for adjustments to take into consideration the viewing light used to evaluate one’s prints.

One of the most useful capabilities of PrintFIX PRO is being able to print a test image immediately after producing a profile, right from within the program. In addition, through a handy interface, the program only uses one-quarter of a page for each test print, thereby allowing four test images to be printed on one piece of paper — a real savings of ink and paper — and an easy way to compare profile adjustments side by side.

Test results. For my testing of PrintFIX PRO, I made profiles for my Epson R200 and 2200 printers, using Epson Premium Semigloss Photo Paper and Epson inks. What struck me immediately upon comparing the same image printed on both printers using the corresponding PrintFIX PRO profiles is how similar the prints looked. In fact, it was virtually impossible to tell which print came from the one-hundred-dollar R200 printer and which came from the far more expensive 2200. The grays on both prints were clean and neutral. No color cast could be seen through the entire gray scale. Furthermore, colors and details accurately matched what I saw on my monitor to a greater degree than I’ve ever seen before. I should note that the same image printed on both printers using the standard Epson profiles were easily distinguishable from one another.

For users on a limited budget, ColorVision has an interesting solution to printer profiling: PrintFIX PLUS. It has the same user interface as the PRO version, but comes without the Datacolor Spectrocolorimeter. The program comes with any number of pre-made measurement files, which ColorVision has made using the most common printer, ink and paper combinations. Using those measurement files, users can build their own profiles, adjusting them as necessary. Furthermore, if the user has a printer, ink, paper combination not included, one of two solutions is available: One of the existing measurement files that represents a combination close to the user’s can be used and modified to work. (That’s when the simple interface for adjustments and the ability to immediately print test images is so useful.) Or, ColorVision has a Web site where printer, ink and paper manufacturers can upload measurement files for sharing. In addition, there is a user forum where end-users will be able to upload and share measurement files of their particular printer, ink and paper combinations for others to use.

What does all this mean? If an end-user has an Epson printer, for example, but uses a third-party ink and paper, that supplier (or another end-user) can make and upload a measurement file that can be used to build a profile to allow for correct screen to print matching for that non-standard combination.

The art of color printing has come a long way. From “match the chrome,” we can now fine-tune our images and print them ourselves while accurately maintaining the color we see on the monitor.

A photographer peers through the viewfinder of a digital camera, evaluates the light and composition and presses the shutter release. An image is captured. When loaded into editing software, the image is displayed on the monitor. If the monitor has been properly calibrated and profiled, the photographer can be confident the colors displayed will be the same ones viewed through the viewfinder. Once the image is adjusted to perfection, a print can be made. Once again, thanks to accurate printer profiling with PrintFIX PRO, the reproduction on paper will capture the adjustments perfected on screen.

 

John Blaustein is a commercial and fine-art photographer in Berkeley, CA. His work can be seen at www.johnblaustein.com. He was a beta-tester for Spyder2PRO and recently for PrintFIX PRO. He has been an ASMP member for more than 30 years.