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CHROMiX ColorNews Issue #54 - Anatomy of a Profile

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  CHROMiX ColorNews
   Issue # 54 - February 27th, 2014

This Month's Contents

  1. CHROMiX News
  2. Latest blog entries in ColoRants (and Raves)
  3. Shows and Events
  4. Color Industry News
  5. Forum Topics, Random Bits, etc.
  6. Article - Anatomy of a Profile
  7. CHROMiX Open Box items for sale
  8. ColorNews Admin (feedback, subscriptions, etc.)

CHROMiX Blog
For the very freshest color updates, check out our new blog Colorants (and raves).

Respond & Discuss
Don't forget, you can discuss this month's article and anything else from this newsletter in ColorForums.com

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CHROMiX News What the heck have we been up to?

Maxwell Milestones

Maxwell reaches two significant milestones!

1. Maxwell exceeded 100 Million measurements last November. Yes, really!!

2. CHROMiX announced Maxwell 7 years ago at the GATF Color Management Conference in Phoenix (Now the PIA Conference).

To celebrate it all, CHROMiX provided fancy cake for attendees at the 2013 PIA Color Management Conference (in Phoenix, AZ on December 8th). It was fun! Lots of people came by, had some cake and took a look at Maxwell.

We are extremely proud of these milestones. Not a company to sit on our laurels, we have completed a comprehensive upgrade to the Maxwell database system preparing it for the next 500 million.

As of this ColorNews publish date, Maxwell has now surpassed 111 Million measurements!


CHROMiX also showed off Maxwell's DASHBOARD at the PIA Conference. The Dashboard works as a visual command console to monitor devices, facilities, assets or anything connected with Maxwell 'live' as it happens. Maxwell customers can take advantage of this free function by contacting CHROMiX for initial configuring and testing.

Maxwell Client Update

The latest Maxwell v 4.1.5 new features:
- new metrics
- bi-directional scanning with an i1Pro*
- device-then-track selection for operator mode selection
- split patch display of measurements
- bad measurements (over 24 dE) produce a dialog for re-measuring or submitting measurements
- global track changes & defaults are now available
- and a few other nifty features you may notice (all good!)

Changes and Fixes in 4.1.5:
- calculation differences between Maxwell Client and Maxwell online have been eliminated


*All recent Maxwell Client versions 4.x should work fine with an i1Pro 2 in its backwards-compatible mode. It measures like an i1Pro (Gen 1). CHROMiX will be incorporating the new i1Pro 2 drivers into the Client sometime this year.

Maxwell Customer Response

"We use Maxwell daily for Process Control on our wide format machines and our presses. I love the flexibility of color targets and standards that I can use. Everything we do is non-standard, so that flexibility is vital to our success. We had a case where we had to print the same print on 6 different printers and 2 different ink sets. They were an excellent match to each other. We couldn't maintain that level of consistency without Maxwell. The powerful tools and the great price make it the best value for the money of any software of its kind."

Michael Todryk
Chief Color Expert
Avid Ink
-~-~-~

Maxwell remotely supervises the performance of almost any production device from a web browser. Users track, trend, analyze and report on spectrophotometers, printers, proofers, presses and monitor displays - plus their performance or conformance to industry standards or in-house tolerances.

Isn't it time you gave Maxwell a look?

For more information, to receive a demo or to discuss your company's Printing Verification/QA/QC needs, please contact CHROMiX Sales Toll Free at (866) CHROMiX (866-247-6649) extension #1, or email at sales@chromix.com.

Curve3 Feedback

"We use Curve3-based G7 calibrations for our sublimation printing processes to improve predictability. It improves the linearity and smoothness of profiling targets which helps in matching, especially with difficult colors. It also improves and makes CMYK photographic output (especially gray scale images) more acceptable now."

"Printing gurus may say that G7 is for offset printing only, but since Curve3 was introduced, I would advocate that G7 is now very applicable to non-traditional and specialty printing. For example: sublimation inks traditionally tend to limit gamut. Introducing an icc profile can introduce too many impurities. Curve3 G7 calibrations help to maintain a general gray balance integrity while striving for more 'popping' colors."

Bartosz Walczak
API.PL Ltd
Poland

~-~-

"The new 'smoothing' algorithm in Curve3 has improved our results for variant devices, and I strongly recommend Curve3 for anyone wanting to conform to G7"

Rich Cline, Hammer Packaging

~-~-

"Curve3 is by far the best version of Curve to date. A user friendly interface and relevant data that is easy to understand. Curve3 is a must have, and essential for any G7 workflow."

Todd Miller, Electronic Prepress Color Specialist, Independent Printing Company, Inc.

Isn't it time you upgrade to Curve3 also?

CHROMiX is 15 years old!

We suppose this is another milestone, eh?

CHROMiX sightings

Steve Upton will be speaking on a panel at the 2014 FTA Annual Forum 'Breaking New Ground' on Sunday April 27th in Baltimore. His session is at 12:30 PM and is titled 'Expanded Gamut - A Color Geek's View'. Steve will present a fun view 'inside the black box' of ICC profiles. If you're at the conference be sure to come by and say hello.

 

CHROMiX Blog Here are some of the recent posts to our blog: Colorants (and raves)

Shows and Events Color-relevant gatherings to plan for

March 2nd - 4th, 2014 - Print UV 2014 at the Wynn properties in Las Vegas, NV has become the most UV focused niche show of its kind in the printing industry.

March 6th - 8th, 2014 - Dscoop 9th Annual Conference 2014 - Orlando, FL, USA. Dscoop is an acronym for 'Digital Solutions Cooperative of HP Graphic Art Users' and the single largest Indigo User Group in the world.

March 24th - 29th, 2014 - 2014 IPEX Conference and Expo, London.

April 27th - 30th, 2014 - FTA's 2014 Annual Forum: Breaking New Ground
April 27th - 30th in Baltimore, MD. Our own Steve Upton will be present (panel speaker Sunday 27th 12:30 for the Expanded Gamut session). Come by and say hello to Steve!

June 23rd-25th, 2014 - ICC Meeting, Heidelberg, Germany

September 28th - October 1st, 2014 - GraphExpo '14 and CPP Expo 2014, Chicago.

October 22nd - 24th, 2014 - 2014 SGIA Expo in Las Vegas at the Las Vegas Convention Center. All about Specialty Graphics.. and more.

October 30th - November 1st, 2014 - ICC Meeting, Boston, Massachusetts

November 3rd, 2014 - ICC DevCom (Developer Conference), Boston, Massachusetts

Events Calendar: For all current and future events, bookmark this calendar.

Color Industry News What's going on in the world of color

Eizo's new 27" LED ColorEdge CG277

Eizo has announced (and is shipping) the new ColorEdge CG277. The CG277 is the high-end replacement to the CG276, which has been considered the best 27" color critical viewing monitor in the world. The CG277 includes the internal built-in auto calibration sensor, will be LED backlit and touts 99% AdobeRGB. For more information use one of the links above or call CHROMiX sales at (866) 247-6649 ext#1.

IDEAlliances new 12647-7 Control Wedge

IDEAlliance has issued a new ISO 12647-7 Digital Control Wedge 2013 target. This enhanced and improved version of the 12647-7 control wedge target, has 3 rows and 84 patches vs the 2-row 54 patches in the original. It has many of the original patches (some with improved values), plus several new patches. To learn more and download it, click this link: ISO 12647-7 3-Row target

NEC releases new PA models

NEC has released new versions of their PA series: The PA242 a 24", the PA272 a 27" and the PA302 a 30". All models are the newer LED product and all are heir replacements to the PA241, PA271 and PA301 respectively. CHROMiX is testing and will have bench reviews for the PA272 and PA302 models very soon. Our early observations reveal that the new PAxx2 series is a significant evolution on several counts.

X-Rite XRD Update 2.3.2 for Mac

X-Rite has updated X-Rite Device services (XRD) for i1Profiler with Mavericks.

X-Rite new DNG ProfileManager

X-Rite has released DNG ProfileManager, which is a new DNG tool to augment and manage your DNG workflow.

Forum Topics and other bits  Popular topics from ColorForums.com and other things we've found along the way.

DNG profile usage tutorial:   On the ColorSync in January, the Digital Dog, Andrew Rodney shared lots of helpful information about DNG profiles. He also shared a great Hi-Def video about DNG profiles that you can download or view at lower Rez on YouTube at http://youtu.be/_fikTm8XIt4

GDP over inflated?:   Dr Joe Webb, of WhatTheyThink, is a highly regarded economist and financial guru in our graphics industry, so when he says something, we listen... and try not to cry:
GDP over-inflated

White vs Black border:   Ken Fleisher reminded us of an older (but still very relevant) article from Eric Chan about using white and black borders when viewing and proofing our images.
White vs. Black borders




Anatomy of a Profile By Pat Herold

Here's a basic primer for those wanting to know just what an ICC profile is. I've tried to tuck in all the basic little tidbits of information and color management axioms that may be useful in your color management workflows. See Steve Upton's article on The Color of Toast to see a light-hearted analogy for understanding color management. http://www.colorwiki.com/wiki/The_Color_of_Toast


It's a computer file

An ICC profile is a file that resides on your computer, much as other files do. One thing to keep in mind is that every profile has an internal name as well as an external name. The file name is what you will see when looking through your files on your computer using Windows Explorer, or a Finder window on a Mac. You can rename this file as you would any other file on your computer. Watch out though! The internal file name is the name that is listed when you are viewing a list of profiles from inside an app like Photoshop or Lightroom. When the ICC profile format was created in the olden days, some operating systems had a limit to how many characters a file had. So the internal file name allowed for more characters in order to describe a profile better. While it's a generally accepted practice to keep these external and internal names identical, it's important to recognize that these can be different. This might explain your confusion one day, when you have renamed your output profile to something like "My favorite profile.icc" and then go looking for it in your profile drop-down box. You won't find it there because it will still be named "Ep3880 Premium Luster.icc" - the internal file name. If you are on a Mac, the ColorSync Utility will allow you to change the internal profile name. Windows has no built-in program that can do this, so you would need a 3rd-party program like ColorThink v2 or ColorThink Pro to change the internal name.


It's a snapshot in time

When a device profile is created, it has captured the device's behavior at a certain point in time. With a printer profile this was done using certain inks, paper and printer - and certain settings in the software such as media type, linearization and ink limiting. It's always good to keep in mind that if any of these processes change in any way, the profile become invalid or obsolete. It no longer reflects accurately the state of that process. If you're suddenly getting different color, check to see what's changed.


It connects between color spaces

CIE Lab is a universally recognized 3D space for defining a color precisely. If you're looking at a Lab value, then you have there an actual defined color. You can think of Lab as a sort of universal translator for color. A profile figures out how best to translate your device's numbers into the "universal color language": Lab - and also how to go the other direction from Lab into device space. So if you are printing to your printer out of Photoshop, a simplified way to visualize this is: Your image starts out in your AdobeRGB working space numbers, > then the AdobeRGB profile transforms it into Lab space, > your Premium Luster profile picks it up in Lab space, > and transforms the image into Epson3880 printer space numbers.

Notice that this involves two profiles. Profiles are almost always used in pairs. You're converting out of a device's space into the universal translator, and then out of the universal translator into the new device's space.

It goes in two directions

A printer profile will work in two directions. A typical use for a profile is in sending an image to the printer. This is called the rendering direction or the B to A direction. It handles the job of taking color numbers from the Lab space and converting them to numbers that the output device (the printer) will use to put the appropriate amount of ink onto the paper. This is Lab to Printer. A profile can also be used in the opposite direction, from Printer to Lab. This is the direction that will be used when you use a profile to soft-proof in Photoshop. When soft-proofing, you are asking the profile to convert from the printer space into Lab space so that you can see the results on the screen in Photoshop. This is called the proofing direction or the A to B direction. You can think of this as using the profile to "print" to your monitor. These two directions are saved in different tags inside the profile. These tags are also called tables or LUTs (Look-Up-Tables).

Some profile creation software like X-Rite's i1Profiler allow you to choose different sizes for these separate sets of tables. This might be useful if you are primarily concerned with printing and not with proofing. Choosing a smaller table size for the A to B direction will allow your profile file size to be smaller without sacrificing any quality in your printing.

It's possible to swap these tables around between profiles. If you like the printing result of one profile, but prefer the soft-proofing behavior of a different profile, some programs like ColorThink will allow you to put a table from one profile into another.


Tag table

Embedded in a profile is a tag table that contains the rendering intent tag tables (more on those below), a copyright tag (so you can find out who made the profile), tags that define the white point, black point and primary colors of the profile, and sometimes even the measurement data and parameters that were used to construct the profile originally.


An intense look at Intents

Also included in the guts of a profile are four different rendering intents. The program you're printing from will allow you to choose one of these intents, and you can choose according to your intentions for how you want your colors handled. Your rendering intent choice will affect in a big way how any out of gamut colors will be handled.

Perceptual:
Some people will want to preserve the relationship between colors that are close to each other, so any color changing will appear more "natural." or evenly spaced. This is great for portrait work. Facial colors will tend to have smooth gradients from one shade to another. Perceptual will tend to de-saturate colors though, so this is not so good for vivid scenery images. Perceptual will also tend to give you more shadow detail. Rel Col. and Abs. Col. are constructed along more or less mathematical lines. But creating good Perceptual and Saturation rendering intents is almost an art form. It's a bit tricky to preserve the differences between colors in a natural way and at the same time try to not de-saturate the colors too much when brought into gamut. You get different results with different profile-building software.

Relative Colorimetric:
For your eye-popping, maximum saturation images, you will want to use Rel Col. It will preserve as much gamut as it can, and it will only desaturate your out-of-gamut colors to just within your printer's ability to print. This will also mean that there might not be much difference between various shades of saturated pixels. A red fire engine will tend to blend into one blob of the same maximum red. In Photoshop, you can select "Black Point Compensation" in order to get the same preservation of shadow detail in Rel. Col. that you can get with Perceptual. Rel. Col. is a good choice for Fine Art reproduction work, as it will give you the most accuracy for colors that are already in-gamut for your printer. This is also a good all-around rendering intent for a printer with a wide gamut, which is expected to contain most of the colors of your images.

Absolute Colorimetric:
This is rarely used unless someone wants to maintain the same whiteness on the new print as you had on the profile you're converting from. If you're printing a hard proof to simulate what a newspaper print will look like, you can use Abs Col while converting from a newsprint profile to an inkjet profile, and your inkjet print will have all the gray whites that a newsprint paper would have.

Saturation:
This is very similar to Perceptual, but is intended to offer slightly more saturation than Perceptual normally offers. This is rarely used, but read this note for some inspiration to try this rendering intent more often:
http://www.colorwiki.com/wiki/Color_Management_Myths_6-10#Myth_.239:_The_Saturation_rendering_intent_sucks


It is important to note that all ICC printer profiles have these four rendering intents built into them. It's part of the ICC specification. There is apparently a myth floating around out there that there is only one rendering intent, say perceptual, in the profile - or that the profile when it was made, was intended for only a certain rendering intent. Not true! I'll say it again: All ICC printer profiles have these four rendering intents built into them. People do have different goals in mind when printing, and all four of these are very valid on different occasions. A profile is not made for "one" rendering intent. You usually just need to click a drop down box and choose a different one if you wish.

Sometimes a paper manufacturer's instructions about how to print will include generic recommendations, and may suggest you use the Perceptual rendering intent. This intent is sometimes considered the "safest" rendering intent to recommend because this allows our perception of the differences between colors to continue to look natural, even if the overall impression may be a bit "flat". If I had no idea what your images were like, and no idea of what printer you were using, I guess I'd recommend Perceptual too. When a profile is created, it is required to have a "default rendering intent". This is just an information field in the header of the file, and has no effect on the creation or function of the profile. (It's not even picked up or used by most programs.) This is often set at Perceptual, but that does not mean this was the rendering intent the profile was "made for". It is understandable why Perceptual is recommended as a place to start. But don't let that stop you from trying out the others!


More ideas

If you ever have any doubt that a profile is doing its job, or to put it another way - if you ever want to test your workflow to see if it is applying your profiles correctly, check out our article on Stunt Profiles. These are artificially constructed profiles that will help you test whether rendering intents are being used correctly, or if your monitor profile is actually being picked up and used, or if you just like printing strange pictures. http://www.colorwiki.com/wiki/Stunt_Profiles


I have mainly concentrated on the use of the typical output profile for use when printing. For information on the other types of profiles, see this newsletter article:
http://www.colorwiki.com/wiki/ColorNews_No._22_-_The_7_ICC_profile_types

Thanks for reading,

Patrick Herold
CHROMiX

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