Calibrating home printers and paper?

jfriend

I'm getting a little more serious about home printing and I'm looking for some reading material on calibrating your printer/paper combination - what to do, what products to use, how much it matters, creating your own ICC profiles, etc...

I've also seen that there is a choice to be made on whether you let your printing software do color management or your printer driver and I'd like to learn more about what to do there.

Are there any good articles about tihs online that anyone can point me to? Or any good books on the topic?

I am already doing monitor calibration using a GretagMacbeth Eye One and do soft proofing before doing online print ordering so I'm not a total newbie here, but I haven't really worried about my own home printing setup yet.

pathfinder

John,

To date, I have had good results using the paper manufacturer's profile with Epson and Red River. My monitor is calibrated by a SPyder 2 Pro and my prints are a good match. Prints ordered from Smugmug are close matches to prints from my printer also.

When printing from Photoshop ( or any other color space aware software ) you want to disable the printer doing anything to the color - ie: Let Photoshop manage the color. Letting the printer manage the color is just wrong when printing from a color space aware program. In essence it is defeating what you accomplished in getting the color where you wanted it in Photoshop.

I have PrintFix Pro 2.0 at home, but it will be at least a month before I feel capable of making any comments about it.

arodney

I'd stick with the GretagMacbeth (now X-Rite) solutions but they are more expensive. You should first try using canned profiles from the printer manufacturer depending on the make. The better Epson printers (3800 and up) have very good paper profiles built by Epson USA should you be using Epson papers. I'd try them first.

jogle

I went down this road about a month ago. I already had the ColorVision Spyder2 for my monitors and I just added a ColorVision Print-Fix2 to the setup

http://www.colorvision.com/product-pp-pfp.php

I've got the Canon i9950 (a3+ sized, 8 ink tanks, not a US model) and wasn't totally happy with how my prints were looking using canned profiles. slight red casts to some papers and a but muddy in others.

The print-fix has made a huuuuuuuuge difference. my colours are now bang on. I have caliberated all the canon papers I use as well as some epson glossy roll paper (which looked crap using a standard profile) and Hahnemuhle art papers.

I'm using a mac and the printfab printer driver www.printfab.net to drive the printer. I caliberated the Canon driver and the Printfab driver seperately for the Canon pro photo paper and I can see tiny differences in the way they apply the ink.

It doesn't take long, the step by step software takes care of printing out the profile sheets and it takes me about 20 min to go step by step through all the little swatches. The printfix has a button on the top, you position it over the swatch, click the button and in about a 1/2 a sec, the light goes off and a wee beep tells you to move onto the next one. You can choose from a one page basic prifile, a one page advanced profile or a three page expert profile. I've just done the advanced ones so far.

I just let photoshop manage the colours and turn off all correction in the driver. I haven't tried it the other way but it works for me.

So my advice is to forget canned profiles and splash out on a printer profiler. Best move I ever made, I now print a lot more photos because I know I'm going to be happy with the result.

jfriend

arodney wrote:

I'd stick with the GretagMacbeth (now X-Rite) solutions but they are more expensive. You should first try using canned profiles from the printer manufacturer depending on the make. The better Epson printers (3800 and up) have very good paper profiles built by Epson USA should you be using Epson papers. I'd try them first.

So, are the paper profiles that come from Epson built into their own print driver so they get used by the printer that way? Or does one have to "install" them somehow into Windows, into the print driver or into Photoshop? Are these also ICC profiles so you can soft proof in Photoshop? I generally understand color management and soft proofing, but it's a mystery to me how a printer connected to my PC knows what paper is being used so it can adjust the ink flow accordingly or how I teach it about new paper profiles. I currently have an HP Photosmart printer.

Andrew, I'm actually shopping for a new, quality photo printer - probably something that can do up to 11x14. Do you know of any sites that describe/compare the quality photo printers from HP, Canon and Epson to help me figure out which models to look at. I'm most interested in quality and not that concerned about price or speed. Or, do you have any specific recommendations yourself?

Thanks in advance for any help.

arodney

jfriend wrote:

So, are the paper profiles that come from Epson built into their own print driver so they get used by the printer that way? Or does one have to "install" them somehow into Windows, into the print driver or into Photoshop?

They are ICC profiles built using off the shelf stuff (Monaco PROFILER, DTP-70 instrument etc). Just like any other profiles you'd download or purchase. The printers are quite consistent so one can build a generic profile for these devices and most users will be more than pleased. A custom profile is a tad better (I've tested this using my 3800 and 4800). They soft proof in Photoshop and work just like any other profile.

I generally understand color management and soft proofing, but it's a mystery to me how a printer connected to my PC knows what paper is being used so it can adjust the ink flow accordingly or how I teach it about new paper profiles. I currently have an HP Photosmart printer.

Until the brain probe comes to market, you have tell it. There are all kinds of different places you can do this but you have to pick a paper profile and rendering intent somewhere.

I'm biased towards Epson although I also have a Canon ipf5000 and 9500. The 3800 is my favorite.

claudermilk

Like James, I found that the custom profiles made an enormous difference. I was fortunate to get the loan of the appropriate hardware & drivers a few years ago & built profiles of everything I was planning on using at the time. Prices on these has come way down since then.

For printing, I currently use PS & have it do the color management. Works quite well. I will eventually switch to QImage & have that run the colors. This is done by telling it which ICC profile to use for output.

I'd say start withthe canned profiles & if they work, you're done. If not, then look at either getting the hardware yourself, or spending the $25-35 each for custom-made profiles.