CCP 3880 Profiles

1

The icc’s I created for CCP K3 Vivid Ultra HD are nowhere near the accuracy of the curves I created for PiezoPro. I’m running both inksets on a pair of Epson3880’s.

I’m using an i1 Pro2 to create a custom icc for CCP ultra HD inks in a 3880 on Epson Legacy Platine. (The iMac is recently calibrated with the same device.)

I seem to recall some anomaly with printing the control patch charts and this computer. My web search has come back empty.

Q1: Is there a quality difference in printing the patches in a scrambled pattern vs. in a chromatic pattern?

My images are generally 16 bit color; the control patch files generated by i1Profiler are 8 bit.

Q2: Does bit depth affect profile creation? If so, would converting the patches charts to 16 bit yield different results?

I print through Print-Tool, so I chose “No Color Management” in Print-Tool. I used i1 Profiler to generate and save 2033 patches. After 24 hours of drying time, I created the profile; then I chose “Optimize” and Printed another 2033 patch set using that first profile. This created an “optimized” icc.

I selected M0 single scan, photo paper, semi-matte Paper, and Solvent Inkjet flyout settings in i1Profiler.

My system is a 27"iMac, OS X 10.13.3.

I’ve been forced into iterative printing, making adjustments in PS until the print looks close to my preference. Any tips on creating ICC’s for your inkset on this printer? I was expecting far better results with a $1500 spectrophotometer.

Unless I’ve overlooked something in my internet search, I have come back empty on discovering anything I’m doing wrong. Is there a specific web source you could refer me to?

2

Yes. I suggest scrambling.

Not exactly. I think the accuracy issue you are seeing is a problem of smoothness. You need to scramble your patches, print about 3000 of them, and then set your smoothness to about 60 to 70 percent for the 3880. This will give you a good ICC.

This won’t work. use Adobe Color Print Utility.No Color Management option is missing in Photoshop

best,
Walker

3

Admittedly I’m only an occasional Mac & PT user, but I don’t get this. I thought that the whole point of PT was to enable no colour management for QTR post-10.6.8. My understanding of ICC profile creation is that all you need to do is print the relevant charts without any colour management or resizing and using the relevant printer driver settings, incl colour management off. Why couldn’t you use PT to do this? I’d also probably use i1P to print them over PT, but where’s the problem with using PT?

5

Learn something every day! Thanks.

4

Print-Tool enables no color management for low-gamut (grayscale) images only.

It creates an sRGB to sRGB “null transform” that tricks OS X into not applying any color transforms of its own, but if you are printing targets it will de-saturate your target space into sRGB and your resulting profile will be very low gamut.

best regards,
Walker

6

The more I think about this the more stunned I am. I was under the distinct impression that PT gave complete control over CM.

There’s a related issue for Windows. If you print from PS with printer manages colours, PS does a silent conversion to sRGB. This is an an issue for example for ABW and for RIPs like Printfab, and for those CM-challenged folk who prefer printer manages colours.

The solution is to assign (not convert) to sRGB for printing, which is the null transform trick. Alternatively for colour printing you can specify the printer profile to be the document profile. I’ve read some analysis that suggests that what happens in the null transform is not nothing, but a conversion to some wide generic profile and back again, so you get some minor rounding errors. Perhaps not critical for colour printing but you wouldn’t want it for ICC creation.

I’m surprised that PT’s null transform does so much damage. This is probably a better question for the QTR forum.

7

I actually don’t think Roy was building No Color Management for color target printing.

This is already able to be done directly from either the ColorSync utility itself or the Adobe Print Utility app or from i1Profiler/ColorMunki. Roy’s reasoning for NCM on Print-Tool was for consistent linear grayscale output.

I was a beta tester of Print-Tool before it was released. The early early version had trouble printing colors consistently, so he did do some tweaking of color ICC handling early on but I don’t think it was ever built for color printing per-se until it began to be used for that a lot. It was never built for target printing.

best
Walker