Q & A : Clarity on Printer and Paper Profiling

To submit your question to The Photo Video Guy Q&A just send me an email at ross@thephotovideoguy.ca Just when I think that there may go a week without a question, I am saved by good folks with excellent questions.  This one comes from Denis.

"I hope all is well and you have the time to answer a question that has come up. I watched Scott's "Grid show #113 about printing your own work. They talk about calibrating your monitor and printer with the Color Munki. If you have set up that calibration of both does that interfere with the paper profile that you down load from the paper manufactures? I have been told you need to bring your paper that you want to print on to calibrate the printer. That would mean you would have to do that to each paper you will be using.

I would like to know if that calibration over rides the paper profile. Do you have to use samples of each paper to calibrate. I have been seeing on thing and told another. I am going to allowed access to a color munki so I can calibrate both. I would like to know how this works and separate the myth form the legend  ! ! ! !"

The Scott that Denis refers to is of course, Scott Kelby, most celebrated (deservedly) of web / new media photographic instructors.  I've written and reviewed on the subject of display profiling on multiple occasions with the fundamental answer, if you edit your own work, you MUST calibrate your display.  Denis' question goes to the next level, taking that calibration to the printer.

I believe in printing your images.  There is nothing like a print in hand.  Folks wanting to make their own great prints, know that there are many choices in printers, inks, and papers to use to product final artwork.  Any paper manufacturer that is actually serious about quality printing produces ICC profiles for their papers.  Let's start there.

An ICC profile characterizes the colour space, or input device, or output device according to standards set by the ICC (International Color Consortium).  It's basically a set of rules that say to achieve this colour space, make the following adjustments to the default settings.  ICC paper profiles provide definition on how to get accurate colour representation on a particular printer, with a particular paper with a certain ink set.  That does mean what it sounds like.  For example, I use an Epson 4900 printer.  So only ICC profiles for that printer are useful to me.  If I use Red River Paper's superb Polar Metallic paper, the ICC profile is for that paper, on that printer and assumes I am using the factory ink.  Since serious printers use pigment based inks over the less accurate dye based inks, this becomes even more important because variance in pigments is reduced and archival life is substantially longer.  With rare exceptions, a print made using the manufacturer's ICC profile for the specific paper on the specific printer will do a really fine job, presuming of course that the edits were made on a computer with a calibrated display.

But there are exceptions.  Perhaps you are experimenting with different surface types.  Perhaps the paper manufacturer whose products you use doesn't have a profile for your specific printer.  Perhaps you have tried the manufacturer's ICC profile and it just doesn't look right.  This is when you need to create a custom paper profile for your workspace.  This is more work than you might think but is as accurate as you can get.

The XRite Color Munki Photo does both displays and printers.  Many calibration tools only do displays.  I have personally paid for and used a number of tools for calibration and ONLY recommend products from the Color Munki line.  Other products have produced poor results and display considerable inconsistency.

With the Color Munki photo, you print a test print directly from the software.  It creates a series of patches printed using your printer on the paper you are using.  You then use the Color Munki Photo to scan the patches.  It then does some significant math and you then print a second different test print.  You then scan its patches and the software generates a new ICC profile that is unique to your setup, your printer, your inks, your paper.  At this point, you no longer use the manufacturer's ICC profile, you replace it with your own.

In order to get a good custom profile, you must wait the required drying times specified, as ink setup takes different amounts of time depending on the paper type, and whether it has OBAs or is resin coated (RC paper).  This makes constructing a custom profile a time consuming business.  Once you've built one custom profile, you might want to build one for every paper type you use.  And that's how it works.  The ICC profile you create is only valid for the one type of paper.  You'll use ink and at minimum two 8x10 sheets and about 40 minutes for every profile you create.  In theory you should be good from then on, but professional printers recommend redoing this every time you have a major ink change, and for each new lot of paper.

I recommend keeping a binder of all patch pages and the documentation from the manufacturer on best printer setups.  I annotate the documents to what works for me.  I print exclusively from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.  The current release offers print proof and final printer brightness and contrast controls.  When I find a setting that works for my printer and a particular paper type, I document that for next time.  I also create specific printer setups in the Print Management function on my Macintosh so the next time I am going to print on Breathing Color Crystalline Satin Canvas roll paper, a single click sets the proper platen height, dpi and other settings.  You can probably do this on Windows too.  I have no idea how and no interest in figuring that out though.

I have printed on papers from Canon, Epson, Hahnemuhle, Canson Infinity, Red River, Moab, IT Supplies, Inkpress and Kodak.  Some are great, some are truly awful, and what works best for me may not be what works best for you.

On the subject of printers, I have printed on Xerox, HP, Canon, Fuji and Epson.  For home based printing, start and stop at Epson.  HP and Xerox do great office printers.  They are not photo printer manufacturers.  Fuji is production level, not for the home or even small business.  Canon should be great and maybe the recent Pro-1 is better, but having owned the 9000 Mk I, the 9000 Mk II and the 9500 Mk II, unless you plan on printing only on Canon branded paper, bypassing ICC altogether and printing from Canon's DPP software only, do not spend one thin dime here.  It's a great system if you stay completely in family. Otherwise it's a nightmare in excessive red.  Canon reps have acknowledged this and their response is use only Canon paper.  Screw that.  I do know that one of my inspirations in printing, Mr. Martin Bailey of Tokyo, uses Canon large format IPP printers and is very happy.  I believe though that Mr. Bailey builds custom ICC profiles for everything.

To learn more about making great prints yourself I recommend a couple of resources.  First is Martin Bailey's Making the Print eBook available at Craft and Vision here.  It's wonderful and will set you back all of $5!  For more depth and detail, the "bible" on the subject is Jeff Schewe's book The Digital Print available below through Amazon (and please buy through the link to help support The Photo Video Guy).

Thanks to Denis for the question and don't hesitate to be the next question answered here on The Photo Video Guy.

Canon Pixma Pro 9000 Mk II - Getting the Red Out REDUX - Color Munki is the Key

A while back I posted about using the Canon Photoprint software or letting the printer manage the colour to get accurate (or less red) prints from the Canon Pixma Pro 9000 series.  Those solutions were cheap.  This one is not but I think it is worth the investment if you want accurate prints (and an accurate display for that matter).

X-rite makes the Color Munki Photo system.  I call it a system, they don't but it really does work that way.  Color Munki provides three key services.  First, it creates a calibration for your monitor.  Second it creates an ICC profile for the paper of your choice on your printer.  Third it allows you to match your display profile with your printer profile.

Display Profiling

There are many display profilers out there.  Most want you to adjust brightness and contrast before starting but many displays give you very limited control over these settings.  Most use some kind of colour banding and intelligent eye to create a display profile.  I used the Huey Pro for years and it was pretty good, except I could never get my Dell 30" display to match my Dell 24" display which was really annoying because they are side by side.  I lived with it but was mostly unhappy with the difference between what I saw on the screen and what came back from the lab.  The Color Munki takes things a step further by doing colorimetry.  The very first time I ran the display calibration, both monitors resulted in identical representations of the same image.  Finally I was seeing what I would get from a professional printer and I was also seeing the same thing on the two displays.  The process is fast, incredibly simple and as I calibrate my displays every two weeks, extraordinarily consistent.  I noticed a very sharp difference between the Huey Pro calibrations and the Color Munki calibrations.  Color Munki for the win!

Printer Profiling

To really get the best out of your printer, inks and papers, you need a proper profile.  Paper vendors provide ICC profiles for their paper that you can download and while it looks like a pain to do this for every paper you might use, it's a big part of getting an amazing image.  Most of the pros I talk to who do print themselves prefer the Epson printers.  The images are incredible, but my own experience is that the print head clogs up if you aren't using it all the time, cleaning it is very difficult and involves disassembly and may not help.  After dumpstering an Epson R1800 because its head was clogged and discovering loads of complaints about even the current devices, I went Canon.

I started with the Pixma Pro 9000.  When two of my cameras were stolen and I had to replace them, I took advantage of Canon rebate programs and got a 9000 Mk II and a 9500 Mk II.  The difference is substantial.  The 9000 Mk II prints very quickly and uses dye based inks.  The 9500 Mk II takes much longer to produce output and uses pigment based inks called LUCIA.  It has more ink tanks and is ideal for archive quality black and white images.  That's not to say that the 9000 Mk II doesn't do a good job on black and white but the 9500 Mk II really is a rock star in this regard.

If I use only Canon ink and Canon paper, I can let the printer manage colour and get pretty darn good output.  But I wanted to use different papers and whenever I let Colorsync on the Mac manage colour, my prints would be too red even with the vendor supplied ICC profile.  As you can imagine, this ticked me off something fierce.  Bring on the Color Munki.

The creation of a printer profile is not quick and consumes two sheets of the paper you want to build a profile for.  The first pass the software produces a series of stripes (see figure) that you then scan over with the Color Munki colorimeter.  It then constructs a second special print page that you print and scan as in the first step.  Once complete you have a custom profile for your printer and that particular paper type.

To see if it actually made a difference I took the same image and made three prints on the Canon Pixma Pro 9000 Mk II.  Image #1 was printed from Adobe Lightroom and I let the printer manage colour, printing on Canon Glossy Photo Paper.  It was a nice print.  Image #2 was printed from Adobe Lightroom and I used the paper profile supplied by Canon and let Colorsync manage the colour.  Colorsync is the profile manager in OS X on the Macintosh.  I don't do Windows but I am sure that there is a similar ICC service on that platform.  The image was sharp but WAY too red.  Absolute crap.  Image #3 was printed from Adobe Lightroom using the ICC profile created by Color Munki for that same paper on that printer.  The image was awesome.  It looked better overall than letting the printer manage colour by enough of an edge that I would do things this way always. and so much better than what image 2 looked like, you would swear someone has spilled red ink all over the second image in comparison.

I'm not alone in finding issues letting Colorsync manage colour on Canon Pixma Pro printers.  Plenty of complaints on the internets.  For me, that problem is now solved.  I've built profiles for Ilford Pearl and Hahnemulle Rag and love the output.  Inkpress advises to use the Canon profiles and their metallic gloss is stunning using the Color Munki profile.

Matching Printer and Display

You get what you see.  Nuff said.

The Color Munki Photo was not cheap, in the $500 range.  If you don't need or want to calibrate your printer (you like the images you get, and using ICC profiles doesn't give you junk) maybe it's overkill for you.  If you want want display profiling there are less expensive alternatives but having owned the Huey Pro and tried a friend's Spyder 3, I think that I would go Color Munki regardless.  If you do want to make your own profiles for your paper and your printer, the Color Munki is the tool you want and need.

Conclusion

I recommend it highly and also recommend other tools from x-rite like the Color Checker Passport.  My prints are beautiful and accurately represent what I get out of my editing tools.  One of the side benefits is that instead of thousands of images languishing on the hard drives or in a web portfolio, some of them also now reside on my walls and in the homes of friends and family.  My buddy Bryan told me that he heard over 95% of photographers never print anything.  I think that's a shame and nothing encourages you to print your photographs like a great print.