Say goodbye to an old friend

i1Pro - Rev A

You knew this day was coming color management geeks.  With the release of its latest version of i1Profler, X-Rite has revealed that its flagship software will no longer support the earliest models of the i1Pro spectrophotometer. 

The i1Pro first came to market in 2001 which is a million years ago in digital imaging years. It has been a stalwart component of the color management toolbox for years.  Even after X-Rite came out with the i1Pro 2 and now the i1Pro 3 & the i1Pro 3 Plus,  there were quite a few of these original units floating around in the industry.   If you still have one of these older i1Pros (Rev A, B, C or D), then know that they will no longer operate on the newest version of i1Profiler: version 3.2 or newer.  

I Love a Color Management Mystery!

Gumshoe, private detective, crime solving...

Deductive reasoning, sleuthing, observing…

A perplexing case, a curved pipe, a deerstalker cap...

I'm putting together my session for #COLOR20 in San Diego. This year John Thornton and I are putting more fun into the topic of color management.  This conference gets better every year.  Hope to see you there!

https://color.printing.org/speaker/patrick-herold/

G7: How a big company does it

Our friend Jeff Collins,
and another friend, Mike Todryk, of IWCO Direct have a great discussion on how Mike was able to take a company with an enormous variety of printing devices & technologies, and transform it so that they know where their color is, they have their color under control, and they maintain a "shared neutral appearance" - through the wonder of G7.  Mike shares details about the software they used, and what they did to improve procedures for saving time, money and hitting industry standard color.   A special bonus near the end includes the mistakes that brand owners commonly make when communicate color to printers.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/episodes/iwco-direct-the-benchmark-of-a-process-control-culture

24. IWCO Direct: The Benchmark of a Process Control Culture Mike Todryk elegantly walks through what anyone would describe as THE absolute benchmark process control company - across (3) facilities, (13) Continuous Web Litho Presses, (10) Continuous Web Inkjet Presses, (10) Flexo Presses, (3) Digital EP Presses, (2) Sheetfed Offset Presses, (3) Contract Proofers - maintained by (4) in-house G7® Experts.

Print Gamut Ins and Outs

The March/April edition of the SGIA Journal has published an excellent article by Steve Upton:
Print Gamut Ins and Outs

The article is chock-full of interesting bits of info about color gamuts.  Learn what can be done to increase a printer's gamut, what does not work, how different systems like xCMYK & CMYKRGB compare, and get an "insider's view" of how gamut volume calculations are made, all by the creator of ColorThink himself!

Profiling Secrets revealed!

Steve Upton, Pat Herold and Rick Hatmaker are gearing up to head to the PIA Color Conference 2019 in San Diego coming up in January 12th to 15th.  Pat will be presenting a session on how to make great profiles. Steve has a couple of sessions on verification & troubleshooting inkjet output, as well as analysis of expanded gamut printing.

CHROMiX will also be providing a 20th Year Birthday Cake during the 3:20 pm afternoon break on Monday the 14th. Come join us if you can!

Last year was a surprisingly great conference in the new location with a lot of new people.   This year promises to be even better!

Color 2019 is back with more than 35 in-depth sessions, featuring four tracks, including Brand & Design, Print Production How-to's, Wide Format Inkjet, and Standards & Research. Whether you're a creative, brand professional, production specialist, or a color management expert, there will be sessions that are well-matched for you at this year's conference. Color 2019 is where you'll find the best, most practical and in-depth information from the best minds in color—and gain knowledge that will strengthen your competitive edge.

Visit www.printing.org/color for more information!

PIA Color Conference going to be a great event

This year's Color Conference is taking place Dec 3-6 at the Pointe Hilton Squaw Peak in Phoenix.

CHROMiX will be there en force again this year (we've attended and presented every year since the conference's inception), with Steve Upton, Rick Hatmaker and Pat Herold all in attendance.

Steve Upton is serving on the advisory board for the event and is also presenting a session called "Density Today: Avoid or Embrace? Both!". You might think "Density? Really?" Yes! In today's modern, colorimetric, G7 world, density still shows up regularly. It's VERY important to know when it's a bad idea and why, even when your most important customer continues to swear by it.

Also, this year's conference is Curve4's coming-out party. CHROMiX and HutchColor are readying the fourth major release of the world's de-facto standard G7 calibration tool. We'll be demonstrating the integrated measurement capabilities in our booth (driving Konica Minolta, Techkon and X-Rite hardware) and serving up all the juicy details at our vendor session. Between the full-featured Verify functions, powerful enhancements to Calibration, and a new Blend tool, Curve4 is an indispensable tool for G7 implementation.

So come by the show! Airfares are cheap, hotels are reasonable and if you contact us directly we can give you a super special secret code that knocks $100 off the entrance fee.

For more info, go here

EFI and Curve3

Curve3 recently made it into EFI’s official Knowledge Base (their online help resource) with a procedure for G7 calibrations for the Fiery proServer and Fiery XF systems. 

The procedure is a straight-forward "How-To" guide with step-by-step instructions and many good screen illustrations.  CHROMiX and HutchColor both worked with EFI to make this happen. 

EFI’s Knowledge Base link:
G7_and_Curve3_in_Fiery_XF_How-To_Guide.pdf

Check your instruments

The beginning of a new year is a great time to take stock of all your measurement devices.  I'm thinking that peak time around your company is winding down now, and you have a bit of time to devote to some proactive maintenance.

This is a good time to:

•  Run your spectros through any diagnostic programs that are available for your devices.  Barbieri has a software tool called "Service Report" for all of their instruments and X-Rite has a utility called "i1Diagnostics" that has been recently updated to work with the i1Pro 2 and IO 2 table.

The reason why you want to run your instruments through these tools when there is nothing wrong with them, is so you can have a record of what your instrument looks like when everything is good.  Run your instrument through the diagnostic tool, save the result and keep it for the future.  Someday you'll thank me when you have a color problem and the idea goes through your mind, "I wonder if the instrument is bad?"  You can run the process again and hopefully say, "Well the service report shows basically the same numbers it did when we ran the same test back in January."

• An even better way to have assurance of instrument accuracy is to measure a control tool on a regular basis.  This control tool would be a control strip that is specially made to be stable and colorfast for a long time.   We sell the Vogelsong COLORef and also bundle it with our MeasureWatch service of Maxwell.  This combination gives you a quality control strip as well as an easy way to track the accuracy of your device as you make routine instrument checks over time.  The idea is that if an instrument is going out of spec. you'll know about it ahead of time. 

CHROMiX on NEC Google+ hangout

Hey everyone… I just spent an hour discussing color management on the NEC Google+ hangout panel. It was a live discussion and a YouTube video recording is available at NEC Google+ hangout discussion. Check it out!

Black and white display

Maybe this seems rather regressive, but in a day and age when people are using their phones to send text messages, this could be the next Big Thing.

Did you know you can calibrate an Eizo to produce a perfectly black and white display? I didn't. A recent post in ColorForums got me doing some research in this vein.  There are a couple of ways to do this.  One is to create an RGB profile in Photoshop but define the primary colors using very low-chroma primary colors.  Eizo's ColorNavigator software can be called in to emulate that profile on their display and you end up with a mostly black and white display.  An even better way to get a more completely neutral result is to go into the ColorNavigator advanced feature that allows you to independently adjust contrast, saturation and such on 6 colors.   I removed all saturation, re-calibrated, and now have a perfectly calibrated black and white display.   (I wonder if I can get 'I love Lucy' on this...?)

Curve3 is here!

Curve3 is out! Curve3 is the latest version of the calibration software that simplifies the IDEAlliance G7 calibration method for linearizing printing presses and other printers. While we talked about Curve3 in our December newsletter, we came up with so many more features to add that it took longer to finally get it all ready. We think it will prove to be worth the wait!

This new version has advanced smoothing algorithms when inputting data, the ability to linearize special inks besides CMYK, the ability to use the printer's native black as the aim point (useful for some inkjets), the ability to begin with custom values in the initial calibration (making for improved results), improvements to VPR (the Virtual Press Run) module, and a lot of additional analysis and diagnosis functions.  Click here for more details on our website.   Click here for a newsletter article describing the new features.

i1 sale ends soon

CHROMiX is having a sale on ALL i1 products from X-Rite, for a very (very) limited time. Any product that has an "i1" on it will cost you 10% less up until midnight of Wednesday, November 21st.

https://www2.chromix.com/ColorGear

Purchase any 'i1' product before Thanksgiving and we'll take an additional 10% off the CHROMiX price for all i1 items on your order. All i1 product is included in this sale.

Announcing Curve3

Seattle, WA - Oct 2, 2012 - CHROMiX and HutchColor announce the newly updated Curve3™ G7® calibration software at Graph Expo 2012 in Chicago.

Curve 3 is the successor to the industry-leading Curve2™ G7 calibration tool.  Curve2 evolved from the original IDEALink Curve calibration tool that helped launch G7 and establish it as an industry-changing technology.

Curve3 builds upon Curve2's core capabilities with a strong list of additional features requested by the industry:

-         Innovative multi-dimensional data smoothing

-         Special (CMYK+) ink calibration for packaging

-         Spectral VPR (applies curves to full-spectral data)

-         New black-point options for ink-jet and digital

-         Enhanced TVI calibration for European users

-         Intelligent error-reporting and resolution

-         User-specified starting calibration

-         User-defined control point lists

-         Expanded graphs & reports

        … and more

In addition, Curve3 supports OneRun targets and Esko's PressSync® calibration scheme. OneRun targets combine the P2P and profiling targets into one, saving press sheet room and aiding G7 calibration of smaller presses. An upgraded Curve3 Virtual Press Run (VPR) module will be released at the same time. VPR simulates press runs, generating curved color measurements for ICC profiling and saving thousands of dollars. Pricing of Curve3 and VPR will be similar to previous Curve2 pricing. Upgrades for past customers will be available at 50% of MSRP.

Curve3 will be shown at GraphExpo Chicago, McCormick Place South in the Konica Minolta booth #421. CHROMiX and HutchColor will demo Curve2, Curve3 and also CurveCore, an SDK for developers or manufacturers who want to embed G7 calibration into their products. Konica Minolta designates CHROMiX and HutchColor as 'Technology Partners'. Konica Minolta's new Color Care v2.2 software utilizes the CurveCore SDK to offer G7 calibration to Konica Minolta customers.

Munki confusion

Since X-Rite has come out with a new model of colorimeter for calibrating monitors, I just know this is going to confuse people, so I thought I'd explain things. Internally, X-Rite refers to the device as the "i1D3" to reflect how it is intended to replace the i1 Display 2. But this single device comes in two different models:

1. - i1 Display Pro
2. - ColorMunki Display

The i1Display Pro is nothing like the "i1 Pro" - and -

The ColorMunki Display is nothing like the "ColorMunki"

The i1Pro instrument is a well-known spectrophotometer, and can be used to make printer profiles as well as monitor profiles. Let's try not to talk about the "i1 Pro" when we really mean the i1 Display Pro.

Also, the ColorMunki display is an entirely different device from what most people refer to as a ColorMunki device - which is a low-end spectrophotometer for calibrating displays and printers.

The i1Display Pro and the ColorMunki Display are identical in form, but the basic difference is that the i1Display Pro is faster and more expensive, and the ColorMunki Display is slower and costs less. http://blog.chromix.com/2011/06/x-rites-i1display-pro-colormunki.html

Lion bites ICC profiles

With the release of Apple's new OS X Lion operating system (10.7), there is a new twist that affects those who use ICC profiles. If you have trouble finding your ICC profiles, it is because the users' Library folder is hidden in the new OS. On the Mac, most ICC profiles are stored in ColorSync/Profiles folders, either in the username/Library/ColorSync/profiles, or the HD/Library/ColorSync/Profiles folders. Any software that relies on being able to access and write to the user's folder is going to have trouble with Lion. For example, several monitor calibration applications are able to save any monitor profile they make, but then will not accurately reflect the new profile as being in place as the system profile. Most of these vendors are scrambling to get a new version of their software out to take care of this situation. In the meantime, you can generally get into the settings area of your app and tell it to save your profiles elsewhere - in the HD/Library... location for example.

To access the user's Profiles folders directly under Lion, hold down the alt/option button on the keyboard while you navigate to Go in the main Finder menu. This will make the username/Library folder visible.

i1Profiler version 1.1.1 now available

X-Rite just released version 1.1.1 of i1Profiler on June 28th. This version has a few improvements in how it performs monitor calibrations:

• You can choose between small (119), medium (220) and large (478) patch sets when doing advanced display calibration.

• You can now specify a contrast ratio in order for the display to match the ICC standard PCS black point (287:1).

• You can now use the contrast ratio of a printer profile as the target contrast ratio for a display profile.

• They've made miscellaneous bug fixes that seems to be making the whole program more stable according to early reports from users.

Besides the new features, X-Rite is also reporting a list of known issues and important points to be aware of. Every user of i1profiler would find this well worth reading:

http://www.xrite.com/product_overview.aspx?ID=1397&Action=support&SupportID=5503

X-Rite's i1Display Pro & ColorMunki Display - NEW

X-Rite has just announced two new monitor calibration products called the i1Display Pro and the ColorMunki Display. i1Display Pro is geared for those who want pro-level functions and control, and ColorMunki towards those who want easy of use. The i1Display Pro uses i1Profiler software, and Color Munki Display uses ColorMunki software.

Based on CHROMiX tests of the i1Display Pro, the results are very good (especially compared to the i1Display 2 product). Expect a review in the near future from CHROMiX.

Both i1Display Pro and ColorMunki Display products should be a welcome new addition to the market. Both are based on a new colorimeter device with a new optical system and with a new filtering technology. Both have a new, intelligent and innovative form factor.

Main features included for both products are emissive measurement, ambient light measurement and sensing controls, flare compensation, iterative profiling, and automatic display control (ADC).

The i1Display Pro is faster (5x) than the ColorMunki Display and the i1Display2 and includes a Display Quality Assurance verification, and a Display Uniformity Test.


CHROMiX beta-tested the i1Display Pro for X-Rite and found it to be a superb product, especially for the price point. We're not sure yet about ship date, but expect August 2011.

The i1Display Pro is expected to be street priced around ~$250 and the ColorMunki Display around ~$175. CHROMiX will be selling both units at competitive prices. And until September 30, 2011... you can trade in an old device and receive up to $40 for an i1Display Pro and $25 for a ColorMunki Display.

Rebate form

Main product information PDF

To buy at CHROMiX: i1Display Pro or ColorMunki Display