Colour Management – Part 2

****** TOP TIP ******

Don’t try and tweak a Blog entry while on the train. I foolishly erased the contents of this entry and have had to refill them by memory. Ho Hum….

Fotospeed emailed me back the ICC printer profiles and I installed them as per their instructions. I have prepared a suitable panoramic view of Kimmeridge Bay from Whiteway Hill (constructed from 4 HDR images) from a recent trip to Dorset as my test image. It has been cropped to the ratio of the Fotospeed panoramic paper of 210 x 594 in preparation to print. This image can be seen below:

I am working Saturday and plan to do the test print on Sunday. I am nervous as I want this print to be as good as it can be, and I hope that by following the colour management process workflow will have proved to have be worthwhile.

I will update this entry after I have completed the test print on Sunday.

Sunday Update:

Some care and attention to detail required when perparing to print, but the effort was worthwhile. The print was made using the Platinum Baryta 300 paper and the result is very pleasing.

I will need to try different pano images styles (i.e. B&W, high contrast, vivid colour etc.) on the various papers in the test pack.

 

Colour Management – Part 1

As mentioned in my last post I bought the Photospeed Panoramic paper test pack at the Calumet open open day last weekend. The pack offered free ICC printer profiling for the six types of paper in the test pack. These were:

PF Lustre 275

PF Gloss 270

Platinum Baryta 300

Photo Smooth Pearl 290

Platinum Etching 285

Smooth Cotton 300

In order to use these panoramic papers (210mm x 594mm) you need an A4 printer that is back fed, it will not work with duplex printers. My printer is a Canon Pixma IP8750, and I have found it capable of producing excellent prints. In order to get the best from the printer and these fine art papers I followed the printer paper profiling instructions provided with the Fotospeed Panoramic paper test pack.

However before starting I recalibrated my monitors using my Datacolor Spyder to ensure what I saw was what was printed. The instructions provided  by Fotospeed were fairly straight forward, but I took my time as I didn’t want to make any mistakes. You know what they say “rubbish in….rubbish out“. The end result was six prints of the profiling image chart ready to be sent off to Fotospeed to use a spectrophotometer to scan the charts and generate a set of ICC profiles.

The website says that they will email the papers ICC profiles back the same day that they receive them, which if it works is a very good service. I will post them off on Tuesday.

I now have to produce some panoramic images worthy of these papers. I have done a few in the past which are up on my Flickr page, but I would like to do much better.