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![]() Canned vs. Custom Profiles
By Jim Raffel, CEO, ColorCasters
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On the other hand, a custom profile is built in your shop to match your environmental conditions. The profile will also be created for the exact printer, ink and media you are using. When accurate color is critical, a custom profile is your best bet for achieving the results you and your clients are looking to achieve. Typically, a canned profile is downloaded from the internet and installed into your RIP. The investment of time and money is minimal. So when a canned profile is good enough, the almost zero cost can be an overriding factor. A custom profile either needs to be built by you or a consultant you bring in to accomplish the task. In either case, there is a significant investment of time and money. In addition to the time, several square feet of media and ink will be required to create the color management targets that need to be printed and measured.
When Is a Canned Profile Okay? It's also helpful if the printer manufacturer has some input into the creation of the profile. Printer manufacturers know the best resolutions, pass counts, weaves and screening to use with each printer and media combination. If there is not a canned profile available for the quality mode you want to run, it's likely that it is not a recommended mode for the printer and media combination. But sometimes canned profiles do get built and distributed for print modes the device manufacturer would never recommend. Premium media manufacturers usually retain or have on-staff color management professionals with the experience, knowledge and industry contacts to build the best possible canned profile given the limitations of environmental conditions. For example, our team was retained by a premium media manufacturer to build backlit profiles for their media in two specific models of printers made by one manufacturer. We worked with everyone involved to determine the best settings and actually built the profiles in the device manufacturer's US headquarters. We had access to experts and a very high-end spectrophotometer capable of creating backlit profiles. Without this instrument, it's unlikely you could make better custom profiles in your shop. So in this case, if this was a media and printer combination you were to use, the canned profiles would be good enough and perhaps even better than what you could have made yourself.
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The same holds true for spectrophotometers. There are instruments in the $1,200 range that will get the job done for most profiling projects. However, when one gets into specialized applications like ultraviolet cured inks and dye sublimation on fabric and glossy metal, instruments that are more capable and expensive will do the job accurately and easily. In some cases, this just means adding the IO table option for an X-Rite i1 Pro 2 if that's your instrument of choice. In other cases, it may mean you need a Barbieri SpectroPad for the larger aperture and different measurement geometry it offers. Knowing which instrument you need is part of being a color management professional. If you don't have this knowledge, it's important to work your network to understand which instrument or instruments make the most sense for your profiling needs. This is also one of the advantages of bringing in a color management consultant to assist with your custom profiles. They will know which instrument is right and, in many cases, will own or have access to an instrument you might not otherwise be able to afford.
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Why Create a Custom Profile? We have no good answer as to why most canned profiles put down too much ink, but we have developed some theories. The conventional logic for those who make profiles for inkjet printing is that more ink equates to more color. This is not the case. In fact, less ink usually equates to more color. Inkjet printing is a subtractive printing process, which means all the color you see is actually coming from the substrate or paper. A greater volume of ink blocks more light coming back to your eyes after it travels through the ink, reflects off the paper and returns to your eyes. When you make a custom profile, you can adjust how much of each ink is laid down by controlling both the primary (or single channel) ink restrictions and the total area coverage settings. Neither of these is easy to change once a profile has been created, nor is it recommended you try to do so. Being able to set the primary ink restrictions that match your machine, ink, media and environmental conditions is probably the best single argument for building a custom profile.
Other Settings You Can Control Another advantage to building custom profiles is the ability to choose the number of patches in your characterization chart. There are situations where fewer patches are better and situations where more patches are better. As a general rule, you'll want to produce as many patches as can be easily measured in less than 30 minutes. This is where automated instrumentation can provide an advantage. Once the characterization chart has been measured, you will be able to adjust several settings, such as GCR and black point start. These two settings are found in almost every RIP and, if the color management functionality is enabled in your RIP, it's often possible to adjust these for canned profiles as well. Most RIPs allow you to set GCR via a drop-down list of options. The right place to start is medium GCR, although I've seen plenty of applications where maximum GCR has been applied and worked quite well. The only way to know for sure is to try different levels of GCR with some of your past jobs to make sure they still look acceptable. Along with GCR, you can set the black start point. This refers to where a single black dot begins to replace balanced combinations of CMY. And one black dot uses a lot less ink than three dots of CMY. The result is less ink consumption. The higher you can push your GCR and the lower you can push your black start point, the less ink you will use.
Source Profiles and Rendering Intents
We suggest changing your default RGB source profile from whatever it is (oftentimes sRGB) to Adobe 1998 because this will give you the largest possible RGB color gamut. We also suggest changing your default CMYK source profile from whatever it is (oftentimes SWOP) to GRACoL 2006. The combination of these two changes should significantly increase the gamut of colors you can reproduce. The defaults that are selected by many RIP manufacturers are intended to line up with those of Adobe Creative Suite apps. The problem is that those settings in apps have not changed for a very long time. In fact, the SWOP profile used by default is about 20 years old. In the same area you find the source profiles, you should also find rendering intents. Rendering intents tell the RIP how to map colors that are out of gamut between the artwork file provided and your output device. I suggest changing the rendering intent on your RIP to "relative colorimetric" and reviewing the printed results. In my experience, you will find that your color becomes more predictable and repeatable while your neutral grays become more neutral.
Wrapping It All Up What you will not find with canned profiles is the cost savings that come with setting your own primary ink restrictions and total area coverage. In order to realize these gains, as well as achieve the best possible color, custom profiles should be built using a spectrophotometer appropriate for your ink and media combination.
Jim Raffel is a color management consultant who also serves as CEO of ColorCasters, LLC and ColorMetrix Technologies, LLC. As a veteran of the printing industry and a graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology's acclaimed printing management program, in 1995 he formed ColorMetrix to make an idea he had to make color measurement and evaluation easier by creating easy-to-use software solutions. Today as a certified G7 expert and color management professional, his consulting practice focuses on dye sublimation and flat-bed UV inkjet printing. He has also been authorized by SGIA to conduct color management boot camps.
This article appeared in the SGIA Journal, March / April 2018 Issue and is reprinted with permission. Copyright 2018 Specialty Graphic Imaging Association (www.sgia.org). All Rights Reserved.
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