Yes.
Correct Color does printer profiling, and Correct Color writes printer profiles and ICC profiles. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’ve come to the right place.
So, here’s a look at the subject or printer profiling in as much detail as you might want.
To start off, it’s worth noting that in the large format inkjet printing industry, there are all sorts of terms that have dual meanings, or somewhat misunderstood meanings, and that can sometimes make for a good deal of confusion.
And as an example, let’s start with the term “calibration.” There’s an impression out there that printer profiling is “calibration” when in reality, that’s only one part of the process.
Which brings up the word “profile” which in this process has two distinct meanings.
The first meaning is as a printer profile, which properly understood in this industry contains all the information that is necessary to describe a device that reproduces color using primary colors when it is in a given state. This includes many factors, such as the color values of each primary color, their maximum densities, the white point on the profile, the tone curves of the primaries from 0 to 100 percent, the total of all colors density… and on and on.
Suffice it to say that every single aspect of how a device produces color in that state must be described here, and is described here in one way or another. It’s always important to understand that RIP’s convert pixels into dots using information in profiles. Printer profiles to be precise. Nothing else.
Note here too that what’s usually referred to as a “calibration” in a printer profile is whatever file handles describing the tone curves of the primaries from 0 to 100%.
In digital printing, this is often called “linearization,” which sometimes is, and sometimes isn’t, actually linearization. (True linearization is a calibration routine that makes linear tone curves.)
The over-hyped over-sold and over-vaunted G7 routine (when it’s used) takes the place of the linearization file using a grey balance routine as opposed to readings of individual colorants to create its tone curves — not that RIP’s really care — and it isn’t concerned with making a necessarily linear curve.
However, it is simply functioning as a calibration routine. Nothing more. It’s only that part of the machine state in large format inkjet printing, and only has that much impact on the final result. It’s the ICC profile that determines the colors — including grey — in the final print.
There are purists out there who can get pretty irate if you call a calibration a linearization when it’s not, but I think that’s kind of a silly hill to die on myself. Suffice to to say that while all linearizations are calibrations, not all calibrations are linearizations. But regardless, they accomplish the same task: They all describe a printer’s tone curves of each primary color from 0 through 100%.
Anyway… All descriptions of how a printer prints must be described in a printer profile before it can be characterized. And that characterization is called an ICC profile.
An ICC profile can be described as a file that describes how a device that reproduces color using color primaries will reproduce color when it is in a certain state.
In order to make a printer profile, it is necessary to create the machine state you wish to characterize, and then make an ICC profile to characterize that machine in that state.
Once it’s all done, you have a complete printer profile, which contains all the information needed for a device to reproduce color in a certain state, and then a characterization of that device reproducing color in that state.
And as long as that device is in that state, that profile is valid.
However, it is unfortunate but true that a bad profile is still a valid profile, which a lot of people don’t realize. There’s a misconception out there — a huge misconception — that a profile is a profile is a profile. Just follow the steps, and away you go.
This is most decidedly not the case.
The first thing to understand is that in making the machine-state parts of a profile, you can build into that profile all sorts of bad inking choices and conflicts between single-channel and multi-channel ink limits, that can produce graininess and some very strange artifacting in your prints. And once it’s there, there’s no getting it out. There’s no boot camp or online course that’s going to make you good at this either.
The next thing to understand, and man, is this not understood, is that once you’ve created your machine state, you may think an ICC profile is an ICC profile is an ICC profile.
But this is not so. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The thought is that you just print the patches, read them, and some software does the calculations and spits out a profile. High tech. Easy. Foolproof.
Also wrong. First thing to understand is that when the ICC first got together and came up with the process, one thing that was agreed upon was that ICC profiles could never be proprietary. Obviously if they were, the whole procedure wouldn’t work.
So in practice, anyone can make an ICC profile-making engine, and the profiles you make with it can be used interchangeably with profiles made with any other engine in any circumstance.
And that’s true. But what isn’t true is that profiles from differing ICC profile-making engines are all the same. And of course at this point you might look askance at the screen and go, “Yeah, how?”
Well, rather than type it all out, I’ll invite you to view a pretty detailed explanation, here: