Digital BW, The Print

I've been making my own BW profiles for my 3800 with an I1 spectrophotometer, MeasureTool, and QTR's create-icc.exe. I have always assumed that this would provide me a better profile than any I could download because it would be specific for my printer, paper, etc.

However, George DeWolfe states in "Mastering BW Printing" that he gets better results with Eric Chan's and manufacturers' profiles than with any he can make himself, with any equipment.

Is there something involved in making a good profile other than mechanically printing with no color management, mechanically running MeasureTool, and mechanically feeding the result to create-icc.exe?

Anyone have any comments? 

And is there a better group to post this question to?

  - susan

On Jul 7, 2009, at 3:25 PM, Peter De Smidt wrote:

> It's certainly worth checking out.  I have the Datacolor print  
> spectro,
> and I've made color profiles with it, and generally I've been pleased.
> However, I recently started reading patches for making QTR curves,  
> and I
> noticed that the spectro gives very inconsistent readings of the same
> patch.  Right after calibrating, the first measurement is way off.
> After a few measurements it gets more precise, but it still varies way
> more than any of my densitometers.  With color profiles, it's possible
> that the huge number of patches helps out with this, but with  
> reading 21
> step strips, it's quite annoying, and not very confidence inspiring.

Where absolute accuracy is needed, always warm the device up by taking  
a couple of throwaway measurements, then moving right into your real  
measurements. But keep in mind that a spectro can only emulate  
density, and the end every one is obsessed with (black) is the end  
where spectros have the least leverage. High D-max black measurements  
will always be an approximation, and show wider variance than other  
readings.

C. David Tobie
Global Product Technology Manager
Digital Imaging & Home Theater
CDTobie@...


  ----------


Datacolor
www.datacolor.com/Spyder3



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

It's certainly worth checking out.  I have the Datacolor print spectro, 
and I've made color profiles with it, and generally I've been pleased.  
However, I recently started reading patches for making QTR curves, and I 
noticed that the spectro gives very inconsistent readings of the same 
patch.  Right after calibrating, the first measurement is way off.  
After a few measurements it gets more precise, but it still varies way 
more than any of my densitometers.  With color profiles, it's possible 
that the huge number of patches helps out with this, but with reading 21 
step strips, it's quite annoying, and not very confidence inspiring.