Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

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Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by rjlittlefield »

I am looking at options for color profiling of displays and printers.

On quick search...

For around $3000, I see X-Rite i1Publish Pro. (X-Rite i1Basic seems to do only displays.)

For around $500, I see Datacolor SpyderX Studio.

Below that I see effectively nothing, or at least nothing effective.

Are there other options that anyone can suggest I take a look at?

All pointers appreciated!

--Rik

lothman
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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by lothman »

I still use an old Colormunki photo for monitor and printer calibration. I think they were bought from Xrite and they sold it as Xrite Studio 1. I just googled and found that an identical looking device is sold as Calibrite ColorChecker Studio.

May be you can get a used Colormunki and can still run it with Xrite software available as free download.

Lou Jost
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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by Lou Jost »

Some monitors automatically profile themselves with a built-in sensor. My old Thinkpad laptop also did this. I think this is the best solution, because it not only profiles but also calibrates the monitor.

chris_ma
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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by chris_ma »

for monitors, I can strongly recommend the professional Eizo monitors (I have two myself and used several others on jobs).
the monitors are excellent and come with a really good and easy to use calibration software which allows for hardware calibration (which is more accurate then software based profiling).
the CS line is very cost effective but needs an external calibration sensor. the CG line is even tighter quality controlled and more convenient to calibrate with it's built in sensor.

I used the X-Rite i1 Display Pro with their software for both, hardware and software monitor calibration, and it did a pretty good job, but in the future I'll always buy the CG models with built in calibration sensor, and can't imagine to go back to software based profiles.

for printer profiling, I used the i1Publish Pro some years ago and it worked very well, but the current version seems rather expensive.
If you use brand paper, their preset profiles usually are a pretty good match though, so unless you're doing professional prints a calibration device might not be necessary.
chris

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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by Lou Jost »

"the CG line is even tighter quality controlled and more convenient to calibrate with it's built in sensor."

That's what I use, and they are not prohibitively expensive.

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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by blekenbleu »

X-Rite portable spectrodensitometers worked well for us when generating ICC profiles for printing.
They were durable and, being spectrodensitometers instead of colorimeters, robust to metamerism.
Now that they use LEDs, I suppose recalibration is even less of an issue.
There are some on eBay for less than US$1500...

FWIW, because of different color gamuts and typical viewing conditions,
while it is possible to obtain close matches between displays and printers for some colors,
most folks viewing a display constrained to printable colors find that unsatisfying.

Practically, many color print professionals will use a colorimeter and set of Pantone color samples,
which will cost new nearer US$500 than $3000. Colorimeters can be problematic for some print colorants.
For example, 10 years ago, HP color inkjet magenta was quite fluorescent;
a good match under indoor illumination could be quite off when viewed outdoors.

I knew folks who seemed satisfied using Gretag-Macbeth/Xrite's Eye-One (i1) for monitor and print matching;
they are available on eBay for under $500...
Metaphot, Optiphot 1, 66; AO 10, 120, and EPIStar 2571
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J_Rogers
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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by J_Rogers »

Late response, but have you considered taking it somewhere / sending it off? A local computer repair shop near me used to charge $100 for same day service. On the flip side - the expensive option could easily pay for itself if you did a few others' calibration for a fee.

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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by bobfriedman »

I use Datacolor SpyderXElite works well for me.

by the way, I also use Colorchecker to create color profiles for correction using photoshop. I have noticed a big difference the in the approximated photoshop white balance and color when converting Nikon raw files.. but it also work quite well for Fuji GFX files as well.

When printing I just make sure I have the correct ICC profiles for the paper, but don't let the printer manage color.

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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by cbphoto »

rjlittlefield wrote:
Tue May 31, 2022 1:12 pm
I am looking at options for color profiling of displays and printers.

On quick search...

For around $3000, I see X-Rite i1Publish Pro. (X-Rite i1Basic seems to do only displays.)

For around $500, I see Datacolor SpyderX Studio.

Below that I see effectively nothing, or at least nothing effective.

Are there other options that anyone can suggest I take a look at?

All pointers appreciated!

--Rik
If you are going to profile many different papers and monitors, the iPublish package is a good place to start. If not, that’s a lot of money to profile a few things around the office/studio.

I don’t profile a lot of devices, just paper and monitors. I print on only 6 or seven papers, I have them profiled by Andrew Rodney @ Digital Dog (http://digitaldog.net/). He has produced some excellent paper profiles for me.

For monitors, I use an X-Rite i1 Display puck and software on my laptop, Apple display and an old Samsung monitor. On my NEC PA271, it has hardware calibration. It comes with its own puck and on-board calibration system and I find it very accurate for my needs. I’ve heard it’s been discontinued, so I’d take a look at Eizo Coloredge monitors with hardware calibration.
~ CB

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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by lothman »

Rik,
have you found a solution?
best
Lothar

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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by Macro_Cosmos »

A good way to save big on display colour calibrators is to buy an Eizo or Benq specific il Display Pro calibrator (x-rite) on sites such as eBay. I paid $100 for mine, a new one was over $500 and even used copies sometimes go for that much.
These models are not recognised by x-rite's official software, but third party open source software such as the excellent DisplayCal works without any issues. For BenQ, the official colour profiling driver must be uninstalled, it interferes with DisplayCal.

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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by rjlittlefield »

lothman wrote:
Sun Jul 03, 2022 7:17 am
Rik,
have you found a solution?
best
Lothar
I was looking more for "enlightenment" in general, not so much a "solution" to a particular problem.

I think it will help if I explain the background.

A couple of users of Zerene Stacker recently wrote to me, asking why colors displayed in its image windows were different from colors displayed by other imaging programs such as Photoshop and Mac Preview. There can be a couple of different answers to that question, as discussed HERE. The answer that was relevant in these cases was that Zerene Stacker was not honoring the display color profile. They were using wide-gamut monitors that expected correspondingly muted RGB pixel values to be written into the screen buffers, but Zerene Stacker was writing sRGB values so the colors as displayed were too saturated. This has been a long-standing issue that I never considered very important based on my own experiences, but the examples that they provided were pretty convincing that the color difference could be a constant distraction. So, I decided to investigate and see what I could reasonably do to fix it. That work has culminated in a new feature I have recently released in beta, which allows the user to specify an appropriate .icc or .icm file as display profile at Options > Preferences > Color Management. It seems to work OK in limited testing, though I have complete confidence that it will not work as expected for all people on all systems.

Anyway, as part of our discussions, one of the users happened to mention a book, "Color Management & Quality Output" by Tom P. Ashe, that he had found helpful. I bought a copy and started reading my way through its 427 pages. Roughly summarizing my impressions, what the book's introduction really ought to say is something like
Color management is a mess. Nothing really matches anything else and it's likely to change from day to day and even moment to moment depending on a plethora of conditions including time of day and local weather. You can make the situation better, though far from perfect, by carefully calibrating and stabilizing your equipment, your procedures, and your environment. This book discusses some tools and techniques that can help.
Those tools and techniques range from individually prepared test files and sample prints, up through industrial class stuff. The book is a bit dated, published in 2014, so I thought I would ask here what people are using now, in the general category of printer and display profiling.

My question was intentionally vague, in hopes of getting people to mention things that I had not even thought about.

So, thanks to all for the wide range of responses! If this explanation prompts some more discussion or suggestions, that will be great too.

--Rik

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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by blekenbleu »

rjlittlefield wrote:
Thu Jul 07, 2022 9:56 pm
Color management is a mess. Nothing really matches anything else.
Sounds like things have improved in the 10 or so years since I was actively involved, when
ICC profiles generated with some software mostly yielded unsatisfactory results with other software,
not only because different algorithms were employed for calculating and interpolating among relatively sparse table entries.
At least part of the issue is that those paying for results (e.g. ad agencies) are often not looking for matches.
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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by cbphoto »

rjlittlefield wrote:
Thu Jul 07, 2022 9:56 pm
I was looking more for "enlightenment" in general, not so much a "solution" to a particular problem.

I think it will help if I explain the background.

A couple of users of Zerene Stacker recently wrote to me, asking why colors displayed in its image windows were different from colors displayed by other imaging programs such as Photoshop and Mac Preview. There can be a couple of different answers to that question, as discussed HERE. The answer that was relevant in these cases was that Zerene Stacker was not honoring the display color profile. They were using wide-gamut monitors that expected correspondingly muted RGB pixel values to be written into the screen buffers, but Zerene Stacker was writing sRGB values so the colors as displayed were too saturated. This has been a long-standing issue that I never considered very important based on my own experiences, but the examples that they provided were pretty convincing that the color difference could be a constant distraction. So, I decided to investigate and see what I could reasonably do to fix it. That work has culminated in a new feature I have recently released in beta, which allows the user to specify an appropriate .icc or .icm file as display profile at Options > Preferences > Color Management. It seems to work OK in limited testing, though I have complete confidence that it will not work as expected for all people on all systems.

Anyway, as part of our discussions, one of the users happened to mention a book, "Color Management & Quality Output" by Tom P. Ashe, that he had found helpful. I bought a copy and started reading my way through its 427 pages. Roughly summarizing my impressions, what the book's introduction really ought to say is something like
Color management is a mess. Nothing really matches anything else and it's likely to change from day to day and even moment to moment depending on a plethora of conditions including time of day and local weather. You can make the situation better, though far from perfect, by carefully calibrating and stabilizing your equipment, your procedures, and your environment. This book discusses some tools and techniques that can help.
Those tools and techniques range from individually prepared test files and sample prints, up through industrial class stuff. The book is a bit dated, published in 2014, so I thought I would ask here what people are using now, in the general category of printer and display profiling.

My question was intentionally vague, in hopes of getting people to mention things that I had not even thought about.
I recommend the book Real World Color Management: Industrial-Strength Production Techniques by Bruce Fraser, Chris Murphy and Fred Bunting. These guys were at the vanguard of applied color science and have helped shaped the system we now use.

My personal workflow requires that I use a large “working” colorspace such as ProPhoto or Adobe RGB 1998 (in 16-bit) because I produce a lot of work for the horticulture industry (“oooh! Pretty flowers”) and they’re reproduced in multiple print forms (SWOP, sheetfed printing, flexography), in multiple electronic forms (computer monitor, tablets, phones, etc.) and broadcast (ugh). If an image’s color exceeds the gamut of the output device, I manipulate the image such that clipping doesn’t occur on that output device. For a single image I typically delver four versions to clients, each tagged with the appropriate colorspace, in 8-bit format unless directed otherwise.

The TIFF files I have been feeding into ZS have been 16-bit in the ProPhoto colorspace. I can see the color is off on my monitor, but the output has been color-correct (as measured in ICCView).

A relatively new ICC color profile is the Display P3 profile developed by Apple. It’s a display profile that has a very large color gamut and works very well with iPad, iPhone, and any calibrated monitor using ICC-savvy software. I find it displays images much better than sRGB (better contrast, more vivid color).
~ CB

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Re: Recommendations for printer & display color profiling?

Post by chris_ma »

Color management is a mess. Nothing really matches anything else and it's likely to change from day to day and even moment to moment depending on a plethora of conditions including time of day and local weather. You can make the situation better, though far from perfect, by carefully calibrating and stabilizing your equipment, your procedures, and your environment. This book discusses some tools and techniques that can help.
hi Rik,

while I can relate to some of the above and I suspect it was written tongue in cheek by the books author, I fundamentally disagree.

I've been involved with setting up professional color management for many years now, most of it in the film and video world, but recently also in photography and printing workflows, and if you can control the environment things have gotten very predictable.

In my experience, problems with color management result one or several of the following things:

a) the equipment is not or not properly calibrated
b) the color management isn't set up properly
c) there is an error in user or software
d) there's a fundamental problem of the different media (screen, paper etc)
e) the environment is not controlled

a) to c) are pretty easy to solve if people are willing to learn, take enough care and are willing to spend some money.
easy might not be the right word, because it takes quite a lot of effort is somebody starts from zero, but once they understand the concept it's actually rather simple and very predictable.

d) can be rather tricky to deal with. an image on a monitor will always look different than a print of the same image and a print on glossy paper will always look different than a print on matte paper. but with some experience and care, things can be matched to give the same impression. this is usually not possible by automated setting but has be done manually.

e) is the elephant in the room and can be frustrating as hell. if we look at the same print in a different light, like if we change from daylight to halogen or LED or fluorescent, everything that has carefully controlled so far is totally out of whack. even if we move the print in from one side of the room to a darker corner, it will feel very different.
similarly, if we work at a monitor in a bright room, and then continue to work at night in a dark room, the brightness, contrast and saturation will feel quite different because our eyes (and brain) are reacting to the environment.

so in a way it is pretty much impossible to have complete control over the final appearance of the image unless you can also control the viewing environment, but from the production side things can be controlled very well, and certainly won't change from day to day unless something is seriously astray.

chris

(edited for claifications)
Last edited by chris_ma on Fri Jul 08, 2022 1:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
chris

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