UPDATE
I was unable to properly profile Epson Lustre or Premium Matte Papers
Personal Project
– Ultra Premium Presentation Paper Matte
– Ultra Premium Photo Paper Luster
If anyone wants to try out my ICC profiles for these papers, drop me an email and I'll send them off when I'm finished on Sunday.
I'm also redoing the profile for the Canon Fine Art Matte paper. Canon's profile is horrible for me. I'll do the profile to eliminate the 35mm margin Canon requires for the fine art papers. If anyone wants this profile as well, just let me know.
I'd be curious to know if others had success with my profiles.
cr
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17 Comments
It’s true it’s a bit apples to oranges. As for the 2880, I never really considered it because it gets very expensive very quickly printing larger than A4 (or 8×12 for North Americans) with those small cartridges. Despite having the same ink, there are some significant differences between the 2880 and the 3800. As far as I understand it, all of the ‘pro’ printers are hand calibrated for consistency, etc., before leaving the factory. Which probably goes a long way to explaining why Epson has a good reputation for their canned ICC profiles. That isn’t the case for the mid range models (though you don’t pay the same price either).
In any case, I’d love to hear your experience with the Canon printers. My initial impressions of them weren’t amazing, but I haven’t looked seriously at them in more than a year or two so maybe they’ve made some decent progress. Glad to hear you like the BW output. I’m really happy with the BW on the 3800 with the right paper … I’m sure you get similar results from the 9500. I’ve never had results from an inkjet that reminded me of a nice hand made BW print before the current generation of photo printers. I certainly don’t miss the chemicals or expensive, manual-labour intensive trial and error, though I do actually miss working with sheet film and my 4×5 view camera.
A $500 Epson Stylus R1900 does FANTASTIC job after proper calibrating on the monitor and printer, the color handling is just perfect and I can finally produce black and white prints without any unwanted color tints.
I hope you calibrated your monitor and printer before making profiles because you’re supposed to do that.
I have tried calibrating with the DataColor Spyderprint set with mixed results. The most annoying thing is that the printerdriver under Mac OS 10.5 is not great. It will not let you turn off color management altogether. Obviously that is required to be able to calibrate the printer. There is a workaround via Photoshop but is very time consuming and inconvenient. I’ve managed to make one colorprofile that works good on Ilford paper. I contacted Canon about the issue, although they acknowledge the problem nothing is happening to the driver so far.
I’d be really interested in trying out your profiles for both the Ultra Premium Presentation Matte and the Ultra Premium Photo Paper Lustre. I just bought a Pro9500 Mark II today and have three packages of these papers around. I had the matte paper profiled for an iP6100D a few years ago (I think it was called Enhanced Matte Heavyweight then) and have had generally good results with it. But I wouldn’t expect that profile to be much use with the 9500. I’ve never profiled the Lustre surface, although I like the quality of the paper. Every group of prints seems to have required its own set of adjustments using the Canon driver (which I normally try to avoid). Thanks!
Not having heard back, I bought a ColorMunki and have created profiles for several different papers. I was skeptical about the the ColorMunki but have been pleasantly surprised. Ultra Premium Presentation Matte (the packaging has four stars on it) came out very well, although I haven’t been using it much as my recent prints demand rich, deep blacks. The Ultra Premium Photo Luster is completely usable, albeit a touch warmer than I might wish. The ColorMunki allows one to optimize the profiles it creates by extracting color test charts from problematic prints and rescanning them. I may try this. Right now, however, I’m using HFA Pearl. The canned profile gives me a perfect screen to print match; there are practically no out of gamut colors. Ink consumption is considerably lower than with my iP6100D. Black and white prints are stunning.