When “good enough” isn’t: canned paper profiles

In my business (making prints for museums and galleries) the usual prebuilt paper/ink profile, often described as “good enough” really isn’t. Instead I make my own profiles using X-Rite’s i1Publish Pro 3. If that applies to you as well, here are some tips:

Printing on expensive paper is, er, expensive, so I print the calibration target on a single sheet of 13 x 19 paper. I print 1586 patches because this number gives a chart with 30 shades of black, from white to darkest black. Choosing some other number of patches may only offer 10 or 12 luminosity values. The greater number helps your textures stand out.

The patches are 0.340″ wide and 0.302″ tall, allowing the full 1586 to be printed on a single sheet.

Also, at least with Epson printers, I print the chart using the same DPI (1440/2880) as my final prints. That’s because 1440 shows more paper-white than 2880, and thus the patches are less dense when read by the spectrophotometer. In other words, the resulting profile is different with different DPI.

I allow the print to dry for 24 hours before reading it. This is critical for matte paper in particular.

I do not have a mechanized reader, so do the scanning my hand, using the supplied tools. I time a single pass of the scanner to take at least 4 seconds. The chart has 28 columns, so I’m reading 7 of them each second. The version 3 hardware scans at 400 samples per second, so each patch is getting about 60 samples. (This is about the same time that X-Rite’s mechanical arm takes on a single pass.)

Also, I find it easier to maintain even speed during a single pass to push or pull the spectro unit (instead of swiping left or right) and so turn the table 90 degrees.

Finally (and this will depend on your printer) I add a bit of smoothing to the profile, slightly beyond the default 50%.

I hope these tips help my fellow i1Publish Pro users make better profiles.