Datacolor User to User Support Group.

>David, I bet sometimes you want to pull your hair out. With all the inks
>(with Epson changing them with every printer, and HP not far behind)...

Things are changing even faster now, with new Canons coming out, new HPs,
and other things supposedly coming fast.

>What I've always found, using PFP and several other profiling packages over
>time, is there are a million ways to make a mistake, and usually only one or
>two that produces perfection. Can be frustrating, but in my opinion PFP
>makes it simpler than most other packages.

Thanks! That was one of our goals here; to somehow simplify the process as
much as possible so that it was harder to make a mistake.

Printing targets and setting up all the parameters, it's easy to make a mistake;
the fewer places there are to do this, the better.

Printing a single page target, for instance, is (to me) safer (and also, faster,
and less costly) than printing multiple-page targets.

Measurements are the next place you can go wrong, so the PFP target display
tries to prevent that. I think it's easier to avoid mistakes, now that some
time has gone by, by setting the target window to Measured display, rather than
Split, while taking the measurements. You see them fill in on an empty white "sheet"
and you can more easily eyeball-check each row immediately after you've finished
it. That's my preferred way of working now. One little thing on the "list" is to
add a new preference, or at least the ability, for PFP to remember the
Pure/Split/Measured setting so that it will "stick" the way that you've left it.

Finally, with doing a quick test print using the profile: implementing this
directly in PFP, after building the profile, helps, since you can build and
immediately test without worrying about whether the higher-level color management
settings (in CS2's Print with Preview dialog) are being set correctly.


>Try to make a profile with Onyx
>(my version was a couple of versions old), WAY too many bells and whistles,
>and they seem to find a new color engine with every release. It's one of
>the reasons I stopped using Onyx and began just making a profile for
>printing directly through the print driver. Between photoshop and Qimage,
>our workflow hasn't suffered.

Too much complexity isn't always a good thing;

Or, if there's going to be complexity, make it available for expert users, but
do it at a lower, more hidden, level so that it doesn't get in the way of things
for everyone else.

>What I mean, is I feel your pain! :))))

Not as much pain as there had been a few months ago. Things seem to have quieted
down on the DPReview forum threads, it's almost disappointing, in a way...:-)
I think what may have happened is that the naysayers weren't getting much
traction. Someone would eventually notice their posts, and write some reasonably-
worded responses, and people who'd been using PFP and were very happy with their
results (and there are many of those!) would step in and have their say, too.
It's hard to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about a product in the face
of that.

It's also hard for some of those writers to show up and complain about ColorVision
tech support when so many things were being written there, and here, to provide
exactly that: tech support, and insight; in a way that we don't see any other color
management company providing.


Best regards,

-- 
David Miller
Senior Software Developer, Digital Color Solutions
ColorVision