Datacolor User to User Support Group.

Hi david,
It would be great to have the similar function to Photoshop's 
Hue/saturation functionality added in the adjustment slider section. 
This way if only red needs a boost then I can just have the reds 
adjusted. Currently the adjustment sliders in PFP are global ie. if 
you increase red it adds red to the entire picture.

And curve would be great to for more control adjustments (hoping i'm 
not asking too much but curves could be not easy to control).

And the precise light adjustment sliders could also do with some 
extra explanation on the software.

People would read it that the warm/cool statement would mean it 
applies to the print. Currently it really means the environment the 
print is going to be in so if its cool lighting you'll slide it 
towards the cool side and it'll produce a warmer print. Maybe then 
it'll be better to put on the software this: Warm light (cooler 
print)/ Cool Light (Warmer print).

Just my very enthusiastic attempt to make PFP one of the greatest !

Ed.

I've been using PFP since it came out.  With a little fussing,  
repetition and tweaking I get fairly decent results with a variety of  
papers on an Epson 2200 and an R220, both with MIS Pro inksets.

Yesterday I tried to print an image that was mostly grey, with two  
faces, some flowers and a cross in full color. The image started life  
as a regular RGB image. I selected the soon-to-be-grey parts and set  
the saturation to zero (I also tried other B&W techniques).

When I print it with my PFP-produced profile, the colored sections  
look appropriate, but the greys are off and ugly. Midtones and higher  
tones look grey, but from about the midpoint down into the shadows  
the tones are nowhere near neutral.  Unfortunately I'm partly red- 
green colour blind (and hence tend to project green and occasionally  
red into/onto surface colours I can't see well), so even trying to  
describe the colour is pretty hopeless.

What is the best way to use the PFP system to tell me how far off I  
am on the different color axes I can tweak when building profiles?  I  
simply cannot rely on *seeing* that something is too yellow or cyan  
or whatever, although generally I can tell that something is "not  
right".

Thanks.

Myron

>I've been using PFP since it came out. With a little fussing,
>repetition and tweaking I get fairly decent results with a variety of
>papers on an Epson 2200 and an R220, both with MIS Pro inksets.
>
>Yesterday I tried to print an image that was mostly grey, with two
>faces, some flowers and a cross in full color. The image started life
>as a regular RGB image. I selected the soon-to-be-grey parts and set
>the saturation to zero (I also tried other B&W techniques).

No problem there...

>When I print it with my PFP-produced profile, the colored sections
>look appropriate, but the greys are off and ugly. Midtones and higher
>tones look grey, but from about the midpoint down into the shadows
>the tones are nowhere near neutral. Unfortunately I'm partly red-
>green colour blind (and hence tend to project green and occasionally
>red into/onto surface colours I can't see well), so even trying to
>describe the colour is pretty hopeless.

Send a .zip file of you measurements to me at davem@...
and I'll have a look at them for you...:-)

>What is the best way to use the PFP system to tell me how far off I
>am on the different color axes I can tweak when building profiles? I
>simply cannot rely on *seeing* that something is too yellow or cyan
>or whatever, although generally I can tell that something is "not
>right".

You can't tell directly, from inside PFP, but you could make yourself
a test image of gray steps and then soft-proof, through the profile,
in Photoshop, and use the Info palette to see what numbers you get
from grays, and near-grays


Best regards,

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

David,

Thank you for your offer of help, but I finally managed to produce  
two profiles that are vastly better than anything I've managed before.

I used the 3-page 729 chart.

I can't understand why both smaller charts would be such a problem  
for me. The 150 patch version is *much* easier to read, and I  
wouldn't have thought that my printer and/or inks would be strange.   
I'm using an Epson 2200 with MIS Pro ink.

There is no need to answer this email.

Myron

On 6-Aug-06, at 11:50 PM, David Miller wrote:

>> I've been using PFP since it came out. With a little fussing,
>> repetition and tweaking I get fairly decent results with a variety of
>> papers on an Epson 2200 and an R220, both with MIS Pro inksets.
>>
>> Yesterday I tried to print an image that was mostly grey, with two
>> faces, some flowers and a cross in full color. The image started life
>> as a regular RGB image. I selected the soon-to-be-grey parts and set
>> the saturation to zero (I also tried other B&W techniques).
>
> No problem there...
>
>> When I print it with my PFP-produced profile, the colored sections
>> look appropriate, but the greys are off and ugly. Midtones and higher
>> tones look grey, but from about the midpoint down into the shadows
>> the tones are nowhere near neutral. Unfortunately I'm partly red-
>> green colour blind (and hence tend to project green and occasionally
>> red into/onto surface colours I can't see well), so even trying to
>> describe the colour is pretty hopeless.
>
> Send a .zip file of you measurements to me at davem@...
> and I'll have a look at them for you...:-)
>
>> What is the best way to use the PFP system to tell me how far off I
>> am on the different color axes I can tweak when building profiles? I
>> simply cannot rely on *seeing* that something is too yellow or cyan
>> or whatever, although generally I can tell that something is "not
>> right".
>
> You can't tell directly, from inside PFP, but you could make yourself
> a test image of gray steps and then soft-proof, through the profile,
> in Photoshop, and use the Info palette to see what numbers you get
> from grays, and near-grays
>
>
> Best regards,
>
> -- 
> David Miller
> Senior Software Developer, Digital Color Solutions
> ColorVision
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>

>David,
>
>Thank you for your offer of help, but I finally managed to produce
>two profiles that are vastly better than anything I've managed before.
>
>I used the 3-page 729 chart.
>
>I can't understand why both smaller charts would be such a problem
>for me. The 150 patch version is *much* easier to read, and I
>wouldn't have thought that my printer and/or inks would be strange.
>I'm using an Epson 2200 with MIS Pro ink.
>
>There is no need to answer this email.

But how can I resist...? :-)

I would recheck your prints of both the lower-res patch targets. (Based
on recent postings here, it's possible that you may have printed them
incorrectly at the start, which is where the fussing and tweaking may
have come from).

Paul Nieuwenhuize found that all of the tweaks he'd needed to make to
get marginal results on his Epson were due to the fact that he'd been working
from a target print that had -not- been printed with color management disabled.
(And even with this, it really wasn't possible to get good results).

If your tweaking is more than a couple of points on more than a couple of
sliders, then I'm suspicious of your target prints. Paul, if I recall,
had to push brightness to +18 to get a print that looked -somewhat- OK. This
was because his target measurements (coming from a target incorrectly printed
through a profile!) were too light (and color, saturation, and other things
would have been wrong, too, but we'll just worry about brightness for now).
The profile built from these wouldn't compensate properly for later printing;
usng the newly built profile; when color management WAS properly set up during
printing. With sliders at 0 during profile building, this would have produced
a print that was much too dark; brightness +18 mostly compensated for that;
but overall the results still wouldn't be good, because the measurements
of "profiled" color patches won't accurately reflect the gamut of the printer.

The 150 and 225 patch targets contain measurements for 9 evenly spaced grays.
The 225 patch target also has additional measurements in the highlight and
shadow areas. These -should- be enough to give you good results when print
neutrals and near-neutrals in an RGB image.

The 729 patch target has many other measurements for -color- patches, but
still contains only 9 grays. There shouldn't be a substantial increase in the
quality of these prints based on going to the 729 patch target, as far as
what you're talking about; I'd expect to see subtle differences, but not
"vastly better" differences. Overall improvements you might expect from the
729 patch targets have to do with color more than anything else, rather than
grays.

So, if you have time, I'd suggest doing one more test: carefully reprint the
225 patch target and measure it. Keep the older set of measurements around,
give these a new name, so that you can compare. Toggle back and forth between
both sets in the PFP UI screen; do you see things noticeably change? (You
shouldn't, if both targets were printed the same way). If things shift, then
if the new target print is "right", then the old one was "wrong". Try building
through the new set of meausurements and see what you get.

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