Color Management conference is ON!

The Color Management Conference put on by Printing United Alliance is full speed ahead this year. This annual (until last year) conference is going to be at La Jolla just North of San Diego - a welcome location in January after a wild winter in North America.

I am happy to be presenting a new session at the conference. Following up on the fun we had last time we met (below) - this year my session is on the Secrets of Color Management. 

January 22 - 25th, 2022

https://color.printing.org

Color Ready 2021

Printing United Alliance is offering a virtual conference coming up Jun 9th and 10th, 2021, called Color Ready!

https://www.printing.org/events/color-ready-2021

This makes for a great substitute for the annual color conference, normally in San Diego.  Instead of sitting in an actual conference hall listening to a speaker for an hour, these sessions are concisely limited to 20 minutes and feature some of the best color geeks in the business.

Steve Upton is talking on "Calibration: It's 90% of Color Management Success."

I am presenting a session on day two for "Assessing and Verifying Profiles."  Perhaps I have missed the enjoyment of presenting and interacting with color people more than I thought over the past year.  I think all of my pent-up presenting comes out in this session!  I know I made a point of making it interesting.

Here's a riddle for you… How will this old, green, electric blanket be used in my presentation to verify profiles?

https://www.printing.org/events/color-ready-2021

ColorThink as Art

We always love to see how our software is used in your work.   I was browsing the website for Eizo displays and was surprised to find a screenshot of our ColorThink Pro software among the scrolling slides on their homepage. 

https://www.eizo.com/home/#

Evidently a marketing person at Eizo is making use of the beauty of these colorful 3D gamuts as seen in the ColorThink Pro 3D Grapher.  Sometimes we forget how beautiful color is!

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/

JVH Digital Festival coming in October

If you are in the State of Washington in early October, make plans on coming to the:

JVH Digital Festival

October 3, 2019
Bellevue Washington

The Harrington family are a top-notch dealer for large format inkjet printers in the local Seattle market.  They are generously hosting this free educational event for their customers and anyone who is interested in learning more about printing, photography and color management.  Pat Herold of CHROMiX will be one of the speakers, teaching a beginner's session on color management. 

The JVH festivals are always fun, worthwhile events - packed with practical information for the small photography or printing business.   If you are in Washington, you don't want to miss this!

You can even enter your printed artwork or photography in the print contest.

The event is free, but please contact them to register ahead of time. 

http://www.jvhtech.com/festival.php

i1Pro 3 Plus instrument from X-Rite

For years this blog has been proudly telling our profiling secrets to all who would listen.  One of the policies that makes for a better profile, for certain papers and fabrics, is the use of polarized measurements.  Our president, Steve Upton, has been hammering on the instrument makers for years to please include polarizing capability into their new instruments.   One company that had seemed deaf to our pleas has been X-Rite.

Turns out, maybe they were listening after all!  X-Rite recently announced a new i1Pro:  The i1Pro 3 Plus.  This model is made specifically to take measurements of textiles and other unusual materials.   Important features include:

- Polarization filter that enables the instrument to take M3 measurements

- A larger, 8mm aperture to get better sampling of fabric patterns

- The instrument can support transmission scanning for backlit film.

- The IO table has been updated to support this new i1Pro 3 Plus, and now enables measuring backlit materials.

The new i1Pro 3 Plus and the new IO table are slated to be available in July, 2019.

X-Rite press release on i1Pro 3 Plus

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!

Better transmissive profiles

A few years ago I posted here about the popularity of our transmissive profiles.
http://blog.chromix.com/2010/07/transmissive-profiles.html
Now, these profiles are faster, better and less expensive.  Since that post in 2010 we have invested in a state-of-the-art Barbieri LFP spectrophotometer, which makes it possible to take transmissive measurements using our standard target. 

The word "transmissive" means we are capturing the measurements of the color as it passes through the clear or semi-opaque material.  The effect of a light source transmitting through the semi-clear media and through the ink can best be captured using a spectrophotometer that is specially made for this purpose.  You might use transmissive profiles if you are producing images intended to be back-lit in light boxes or other such displays.

Before, we would have to charge $150 per profile for RGB Transmissive profiles because of the great deal of handling involved in making these measurements using the DTP-41T.  Now, we use the same target we use for the ColorValet Pro service.  This means that ColorValet Pro customers can now get transmissive profiles for only $49 more per profile.  And for our regular ColorValet customers, we have been able to lower our price for standalone RGB transmissive profiles to $99.00.    (CMYK transmissive profiles are still $150.)

https://www.chromix.com/colorgear/shop/productdetail.cxsa?toolid=50191

ColorThink to the rescue!

Tropical fish, or defective profile?

I got a call from a printer today who decided to order a custom profile from us.  He's up against a deadline and the canned profile from the paper manufacturer is giving him a lot of banding.

Always curious about bad profiles I asked him to send it to me so I could take a look.  I ran it through some of the tests we do using ColorThink Pro, including Viewing a Rendered Gamut.  (See the "tropical fish" gamut above.)   CTP showed pretty quickly strange handling of blues, and a section of outer gamut magentas were being mapped to color locations well inside the gamut!

It turns out this profile was made using Monaco Profiler, considered one of the best profiling engines of its time, and not too long ago at that.  It occurred to me that even with a good profiling engine, you never really know what you're getting when you build a profile - unless you have a means of checking it out - seeing its shape, if the measurements match the gamut, if it renders appropriately.

This was a publicly distributed profile, going out to users of this well-known brand of paper. My customer said he was using up more paper trying to deal with his "banding" issues than he used adjusting color. To tell the truth, the profile is not so terribly bad that it produces a lot of bad color. In fact, depending on the content of the image a lot of prints might come out fine. But this customer spent a tremendous amount of time and paper trying to solve this problem while running different calibrations and head alignments with Epson. He had a deadline coming up, was supposed to print 40 x 60 inch inkjet prints, and ended up overnighting a new target to us because he was running out of time.

Some people who have never heard of ColorThink (there are a few) ask me why they should get it. How is it going to improve their color tomorrow? And I don't have a good salesman answer for them.  I say something about how it does not fix things so much as it's a diagnostic tool.  That's about when their eyes glaze over and I can imagine what they're thinking - they don't need another diagnostic tool that gives them cool things to look at but has no practical value.   So this real-world example is just one of many, many examples of the practical value of ColorThink Pro. If this customer had CTP, he would have quickly uncovered the cause of the banding that would have saved them more time and money in just one use than the program cost.  When you've got a problem - that's when you need ColorThink.

Want to learn more about ColorThink?

ColorThink Pro is one of those wide-open tools that are only limited by your imagination. It is popularly known for its 3D Grapher, that lets you visualize the location of colors and profiles.  But when it comes to using the ColorThink Pro Worksheet, lots of people don't know what can be done with it.   I have posted a couple of new videos to our Tips and Tricks playlist on YouTube that can help you get started.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL064AE0D476E8CC58

Using the Worksheet to push numbers through a profile:
https://youtu.be/C5zx0d0A4xc?list=PL064AE0D476E8CC58

Using ColorThink to help in the color matching industries:
https://youtu.be/nVjzOpWlIIg?list=PL064AE0D476E8CC58

Dye Sub printer profiling

I recently got back from two days of training on the new Epson F-series dye sub printers.  It's amazing how many ways there are to get the color wrong in this process.  When it comes to making profiles for a process that transfers color to fabric like T-shirts, you have to get right:

- the settings in the RIP

- the printing to transfer paper

- the procedure of using the heat press to transfer the image onto the fabric.

Don't get me wrong - these new Epson printers are amazing and I've never seen such brilliant images from a dye sub process.   The amount of color you can transfer onto a piece of fabric these days is just stunning.  It's almost like looking at a fine art print.

This training was in partnership with JVH Technical here in the Northwest.  This is a great Epson dealership, well known for outstanding customer service.

No HCT in i1Profiler

The latest version of i1Profiler (v 1.4.2) has added the ability to make a scanner profile. The workflow supplied by X-Rite requires the user to select from a short list of supported scanner targets. There does not appear to be any way to choose a target that is not in this list, and the HCT scanner targets made by Hutchcolor are not included.

These are very good quality scanning targets, and should be a perfect match for X-Rite's latest software update.  Several people have been asking why the HCT targets are not included and if they will be included in a future release of the software.

According to Don Hutcheson, X-Rite will have to modify the software in order to make it HCT-compatible. Discussions on that subject are under way but there is no official confirmation from X-Rite about when, or if, i1Profiler will make HCT profiles. Those with HCT targets are recommended to use MonacoProfiler or basICColor scan+ to make good quality scanner profiles.

Customers of both of these products should feel free to contact X-Rite about this, and let their needs be known.

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.

Viewing a Rendered Gamut in ColorThink

Number 3 in our series of Tips and Tricks for ColorThink shows you how to view a "rendered" gamut in ColorThink Pro. This, combined with the "proofing" gamut can give you both directions of a profile at the same time. This is a great way to analyze the quality of a printer profile.
View it at the ColorSmarts YouTube Channel

or 

At the Tips and Tricks page of the ColorWiki.

Leg, Arm & Back Braces

One of the more satisfying uses of modern digital printing has to be helping kids who need artificial limbs and braces to have customized images of their choice printed into their brace.

Here is one of our targets printed onto a plastic prosthetic material, and a sample of the colorful designs that can be imprinted onto these braces.
We profile this material too!
What can we do for you?

Eizo profiles iPads

I just discovered that Eizo has added a procedure for profiling tablet displays, phones, etc. to their new ColorNavigator software.  They call it Media Emulation.  ColorNavigator is the free profiling software that works with their higher-end monitors like the "CG" series. With this feature, you can choose an option for "Create ICC profile for tablet/display device..." and the software will send a series of color patches to a web site that your tablet can access. As you place your measurement instrument on the portable display, ColorNavigator will read the colors and create an ICC profile.

Now you have a means of profiling these displays even though you cannot connect a USB measurement device directly to them! You can use the resulting profile to "soft-proof" what your images will look like when they are viewed on these displays. Available on the latest version of ColorNavigator (version 6.1.1).

We profile CDs

Ever profile a CD?  We used to profile CDs more often when the technology was new. Since then it has become fairly easy to profile the sheets of adhesive label materials which are then applied to the CDs.

But more recently Teac has come out with a dye sublimation printer that prints directly onto the CD itself: http://www.teac.com/disc_publishing/thermal_disc_printers/p-55c/

We can profile that too!  This illustration is a set of CD targets we developed for use in profiling printers like this.

What can we do for you?

Datacolor announces the Spyder4

Just when you think X-Rite has cornered the market on display calibrators with its new i1 Display Pro, here comes Datacolor with a new Spyder4!

This new device has 7 color sensors instead of the the usual 3.  The software has added capability to do uniformity testing, better matching of multiple monitors, and they will be providing some means of correcting color on an iPhone/iPad.


I'll be looking forward to testing this in the future.

http://download.datacolor.eu/newsletter/2012-01-05-US/

ICC version 4.3

The International Color Consortium has just released version 4.3 of the ICC specification today.

Information at the ICC website is here:

http://www.color.org/icc_specs2.xalter

We will be looking into what changes are included in this new version, and reporting on it.  New profiles are often a consequence of a new specification like this, but there is no word about when new profiles will be forthcoming.