Thanks for all the information you furnished below....
I spent the last 5 days really getting nowhere than where I was last week with color matching.
I will summarize.....
I normally use
1. Windows Vista Home Premium.
2. NEC P221 LCD monitor calibrated using NEC's SpectraView II with a NEC supplied I1 Display 2 calibrator that is special calibrated for their wide gamut monitors. This calibration is performed in the monitor's hardware and stored in the LUTs.
3. Canon 6 ink I950 printer. Using Canon Photo Paper Pro paper for this test.
Test....
1. I set up a simple test target of objects with various colors, bright whites, deep blacks, shades, etc. in a totally dark room illuminated by tungsten lights. Using my Nikon D700 I manually measured/adjusted white balance and shot in the SRGB space. The Nikon RAW file displayed on my NEC monitor in Nikon Capture NX2 looks identical to what I see in real life. I saved the file in NX2 as a TFF and viewed it Photoshop CS4 and it matches identically to what I see in NX2. So we can say that the monitor is well calibrated and both applications display the proper image.
2. I ran the Spyder3Print calibration again using the Canon I950 I turned off all color management in the Canon I950 driver, color adjustment is set to manual, not much else to change there. Printed the Spyder3 test patterns, colors plus grays, scanned them in. Printed the Spyder3 test photo and it had slightly more saturated colors, slight red hue than what I see on the monitor, the B/W sections were leaning more to a very dark gray tint than black. I looked at the soft-proof . The Spyder3 soft-proof colors matched the monitor test photo but were slightly washed out, so I lowered the black level in the soft-proof down to 1 as suggested by David T. and the soft-proof matched the non-soft-proof test image identically for color and contrast. Now this is nice that I have the test image and soft-proof image matching, but neither match the printed photo. If I edit the profile to reduce the saturation I can get the printed photo to match closer to the original test photo, but then the soft-proof image doesn't match since any slider edits to the profile is also going to change the soft-proof image in a negative way. I did a lot of profile editing and the printout still does not match the original image as well as printing using the Canon Standard Driver.
3. Now I went one extreme step further and found a new in factory sealed box Canon Pro9000 MKII for $250 and bought that to compare in this test. That is an 8 ink printer (additional red and green inks with the 6 of the I950).
Ran the same as 2 above, got the same results; printout is slightly color saturated, towards red tint, soft-proof slightly washed out and fixed it with the soft-proof black level. Canon Standard Driver matches the original image very well. I would like to say that this printer is one huge printer and I really can't see any printout detail differences against the I950.
4. Now believing that something is not set correctly in Windows Vista or my system that I just couldn't finger. I pulled out my old Windows XP system, ran the monitor calibration, attached both printers, printed out the test sheets, scanned, adjusted the soft-proof, and the printouts still show slight over saturation, red tint, etc. Again the Canon Standard Drivers match the monitor image almost exactly.
5. Put a very good SONY CRT monitor on the system, calibrated it and the same results as 4 above.
I realize that there are many sliders to edit the profile but after a few boxes of paper and many ink cartridges it is difficult to get close to matching the printout to the display. I do realize gamut limitations but the Canon Standard Driver does a great job.
I was expecting that the Spyder3Pint was going to make it painless for me to generate profiles with different papers, I assumed you just printed the charts, scanned, and bingo the as perfect as possible ICC profile would be generated that would beat the Canon Standard Driver every time.
I really don't know where to go from here. I must be missing something somewhere.
I can use all the help and suggestions that anyone can give me!
Thanks,
Bob P.
At 04:25 PM 8/29/2009, you wrote:
>>Bob Petruska : I will be running the tests over the weekend and report back to the forum my findings.
I will be most interested in your report...
>>I'm sitting here thinking that even though I have a calibrated NEC
monitor how do I know that the printer and the monitor think alike
with the same file data? What I'm getting at is that if I have two
calibrated mid range quality monitors like a NEC and Samsung sitting
next to each other I would bet that the same image file would look
slightly different between them.
If you are looking at the same image on different monitors using a color management aware software (let's say Photoshop with the same Working Space on all the monitors), then the images should display identically because that's the whole point of HARDWARE monitor calibration.
Many years ago, Bruce Fraser (sadly missed) discussed color management, monitor calibration and printer profiles (on Epson printers but it should apply to Canon printers also) in various posts on the old Compuserve Publishing Production forum and I saved those posts.
I hope you will find Bruce's explanations useful:
"At the heart of all color management there's a thing called the
profile connection space, or PCS. In current implementations it's
always either CIE Lab or CIE XYZ, and the math for getting from one
to the other is fairly trivial.
The unique property of these spaces, as opposed to RGB or CMYK, is
that they unambiguously represent a perceived color.
Profiles are essentially lookup tables that say what device values
(RGB or CMYK) will produce specific perceived colors.
Color-managed applications like Photoshop use working spaces so that
they can make the image look right on different monitors.
The Epson profile doesn't try to match your monitor, it tries to
match the working space, via Lab. Photoshop also does an on-the-fly
transform from the working space to your monitor's space, so that the
image appears correct on your monitor, whatever it is. It'll do a
different transform for someone else's monitor, but as long as the
monitor profile is accurate, the image will appear identical.
You profile your printer so that, when it gets fed known color
values, it produces those colors. You profile your monitor so that
when it gets fed known color values, it produces those colors.
Working spaces contain known color values, because they're referenced
to Lab. So when you feed a file in a working space to
correctly-profiled devices, the color comes out right. The printer
and the monitor are entirely separate from each other. They only talk
to each other through the color management system.
So it really doesn't matter what standard you choose to calibrate
your monitor to. All that matters is that you have an accurate
description of that standard (a good monitor profile), and the color
management system will ensure that the signals that get sent to your
monitor will make it display the image correctly. It'll do the same
thing on my monitor, even if it's calibrated to completely different
settings from yours."
AND:
"What color management can do, and do well, is to translate the monitor image into the color gamut and dynamic range of your printer, as faithfully as possible, and at the same time show you how the print will appear, allowing you to make any necessary optimizations before you print.
In applications like Photoshop, images live in an abstract RGB working space that isn't tied to the quirks of a specific device, such as Adobe RGB (1998).
To display the file accurately on your monitor, Photoshop looks at your monitor profile, and adjusts the values being sent to the video card so that the color displays correctly on your monitor. It will do the same when the same image is displayed on my monitor, or on Tom's or Dick's or Harry's. Other than that, the monitor is out of the loop.
When you print using color management, the CMS looks at the source color space (e.g. Adobe RGB) and at the output space (e.g. your printer profile). It derives the Lab values that are represented by Adobe RGB values and by printer RGB values, then builds a big lookup table to go from the one to the other. Your monitor is out of this loop.
To see how the print will appear before you make it, you need to use the CMS to simulate the output, which it does by converting the data on the fly from Adobe RGB to printer RGB, then to your monitor RGB. That's what Photoshop's Proof Setup features are for. In this case, the monitor is in the loop, but your printer profile doesn't need any knowledge of it.
Profiles are like dual-language dictionaries. They're essentially lookup tables that have device signal values (RGB or CMYK) on one side, and device-independent CIE values (LAB or XYZ) on the other. No profile needs any knowledge of any other device's behavior: all the profiles use CIE LAB or CIE XYZ as the interchange medium (they're called the Profile Connection Space, because that's their role)."
AND:
"If you calibrate the monitor, save the profile, load the profile, and
let Photoshop update the profile, you'll get an accurate display of
your image at that calibration. If you fail to take any of these
steps, Photoshop won't be displaying the image properly. When it does
display the image properly, it doesn't matter how your monitor is
calibrated. Right now I'm looking at the same image on a 5000K gamma
1.8 monitor, a 6500K gamma 1.8 monitor, and a 6500K gamma 2.2
monitor. The image looks identical on all three.
Once more, the file-to-print transform is entirely separate from the
file-to-monitor transform. You can whack your monitor out into all
weird states under the sun, and it will still have zero influence on
the print. Forget about the idea of calibrating the monitor to the
print. That isn't how it works. You calibrate the monitor to some
known CIE values, and you profile the printer to some known CIE
values.
Lets say you have two pieces of wood, each of which is some length.
You could say, 'piece o' wood #2 is 1.8 times the length of piece 'o
wood one.' That's like trying to calibrate your monitor to your
printer, and it isn't all that useful.
But if you measure them, you can say 'piece o' wood 1 is 10 inches
long. Piece o' wood 2 is 18 inches long.'
That's how color management works, only the inches are CIE units instead."
Terrie
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