A couple of months ago I bought the new Colorvision Spyder2 and decided to spend the extra money for the more elaborate software package. I've been very impressed with it so far.
Some of you may also recall that I tried Hahnemuehle's new Fine Art Pearl paper recently and I loved the paper but had to go through all kinds of contortions to get a decent print, even after downloading the manufacturer's paper profile. Someone on the list told me that Hahnemuehle is notorious for poor profiles so today I decided to have a go at making my own with the "PrintFix Pro" paper profiling software that came with the Spyder2. PrintFix Pro is a software-only profiling system which means you have to evaluate prints by eye and make corrections based on what you see. Obviously not as precise as something that scans your prints, but a whole lot less expensive. Still, I was dubious. Fortunately, the software's adjustments are pretty simple and intuitive if you have enough digital processing experience. My first print at the default (no adjustment) settings looked predictably awful. I began by scanning a gray card on my flatbed and opening it in Photoshop to establish a rough baseline color compensation to take my scanner's inaccuracies into account. Then I scanned the first test print, applied the baseline correction and analyzed a few points with the eyedropper tool, info palate and histogram. Based on this data I made a few corrections in PrintFix Pro and ran a second print, this one having the rough profile I just created. The difference was astonishing! After tweaking the adjustments twice more and running 2 more test prints I've got a profile that's 10 times better that what Hahnemuehle supplied. Probably as good as I'll ever need for nature photography, though I'm sure more fine tuning would be necessary for really good skin tones. The only shortcoming I've found is that after you generate and save a profile, you can't re-open it and tweak the adjustments you used to generate it. You have to start from scratch every time. Not a problem if you write down the settings you used to generate the original profile, but of course I didn't. I won't make that mistake again! So if anyone wants an ICC profile for Hahnemuehle Fine Art Pearl paper on an Epson 2200 with the OEM inkset, I've got one! -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
