hannehmule paper ICC profiles

[daddio]

Hi everyone,
Apologies for jumping straight in as a new member with a question but I would be very gratefull for any help. I have just invested quite a bit of money (for me!)in a Canon IP4600 and some Hannemuhle photo rag paper, which I have been very impressed with in the past. However, up till now I have been completley naive regarding ICC profiles. As I am now endeavouring to sell my printed work, this is something I can not afford to ignore. The Hannemuhle website offers ICC profiles for a range of printers but not the IP4600 and despite a thorough search I can't find one elsewhere. And so my question: does the IP4600 belong to a family of printers that the existing ICC profiles on the Hannemuhle website are compatible with? Would for example the canon i9950 ICC profile, which is available, work for the IP4600? perhaps that's not how it works. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Best regards
Tim

[Steaphany]

Technically, every ink and paper combination should have a corresponding ICC profile. As you can easily realize, that is a large number of profiles and manufacturers of printers, inks, and paper, who supply ICC profiles still can not address every possible combination.

The best solution that I have found is DDI Software's Profile Prism which allows you to create ICC profiles for every combination of ink and paper that you use. I also have and use their Qimage package, both are a great help.

[daddio]

Yeah unfortunatley I need a free option as I've exhausted my budget

[Daniel Salazar]

hi daddio, welcome to the forum.

you could do what Steaphany recommends you or even better, get a colorimeter and get you own profile for every tint/paper combination. This means that everytime you also change the ink cartridge you have to create a new profile.

The costum profiles are not always got enough. eg I had during several months a problem with my prints, all of them where having a color cast, which I didn't know why appeared. I was using a HP printer with a HP paper, therefore I used the profile provided by HP for this combination.

After reading a LOT and asking a LOT, I realized that the icc profile provided by HP was wrong, therefore after investing a little bit of $$ I got a Spyder colorimeter and got my own icc profile. Do you know hwat happened? my prints are now perfect, there is no color cast.

[Steaphany]

daddio,

Join the club. I still have a long list of equipment essential to the photography that I want to do. Make a list, prioritize everything, and save and accumulate what you need as time goes on.

Since you are looking to go professional, you also need to evaluate how much bang for your buck each piece of software or equipment will provide to achieve your goals. You should also consider the return on investment to determine how many prints must be sold to recoup your expenditures.

The advantage of DDI Software's Profile Prism solution is it uses equipment that you should already have, printer and flatbed scanner. The software comes with a color reference target which is used to calibrate your imaging equipment. To calibrate a ink/paper combination, Profile Prism prints out a test pattern which is scanned by a now calibrated scanner to create the ICC profile. Every other ICC color calibration system that I've seen includes a hardware colorometer which adds to the costs, especially when designed for print calibration.

[daddio]

Thankyou both very much for your suggestions..Quick too! I will look into investing profile Prism when I have the money. In the mean time I need to make some prints with near immediacy so I am going to have to go with what I have. To tell the truth I will be printing my digital art this time round as opposed to my photography, so I'm not entirely worried about colour casts etc.. Any slight colour variations shouldn't really be a problem. What I am concerned about is, will I be damaging my printer by using Hannemuhle photo rag with the canon profiles?? I was going to use the matt paper setting. Would this be a safe bet? Also going back to my original question I have a hunch that some of the Hannemuhle ICC profiles available are simply for the A3 version of my A4 Ip4600 and if any one could confirm whether I'm talking rubbish that would be great!...

[Davey]

no damage to printer possible just horrid colour casts etc. I use a ip4600 too mainly on HP premium (long dry one as swellable) and a few other fast dry ones of varying finishes and quality. I noticed the canon profiles tend to do fine for most paper I've used. I use an after market ink now which is visually identical to me to the canon ink and doesn't fade etc (it's been in an external sign in direct facing sun for 2 months or so now and most ink is faded severly after a fortnight). It seems the same colour wise for all profile tests I've done except the yellow seems a little deeper/wider so when tweaking settings identical to me your results may vary slightly.

If you can get a profile for the hannehmule paper (almost certain they will as big brand) for your printer then great that should be fine. Failing that experiment with the canon ones. To colour manage on the ip4600 incase you don't know you need to turn some stuff driver side off when managing with something like photoshop (set to pshop manages colours).

On the settings page under main tab select colour intensity manual. In manual "set" options under the matching tab set "none". Now when you send something to the printer it wont be ignored or overridden by the driver (as I found). Then set paper profile to appropriate matching one to printer paper setting (eg canon pr1 for pro when printing in quality 1 mode and paper set to canon pro II). If it doesn't turn out ok use the manual colour "set" to darken lighten or adjust colour balance. I did this all visually without calibration hardware and now what I see on screen is exactly what prints. Didn't cost me anything except few bits of paper, sometimes I tweak a bit more for other paper types, with this in mind maybe just print small pics or re-use 1 sheet of a4 slowly moving down the page each time (if you get what i mean, this is what I did). Hope that helps.

[daddio]

Brilliant Davey thats a big help as unfortunatley there is no ICC from hannehmule for the iP4600.
I've got you up untill the color intensity set which I've managed to do ok but I can't work out how to do this:
"Then set paper profile to appropriate matching one to printer paper setting (eg canon pr1 for pro when printing in quality 1 mode and paper set to canon pro II"
sorry

[Daniel Salazar]

why don't you buy the profile, it won't cost so much, I just search in Google and found some companies that will sell you a profile:

http://printerprofiles.homestead.com/

http://www.cathysprofiles.com/

http://www.colourprofiles.com/custom.htm

For free I don't think that you might find it, I even found in another forum somebody looking exactly for the same printer/paper profile.

I just want to add something. I think that you're spending a lot of money for your paper and I don't see a reason why don't you use a lower quality paper that might have a profile for your printer. Like that your you're printing something with awful colour on a expensive paper or something really good in a middle class paper, what would be more worth it?

[daddio]

You're absolutley right-that is the conclusion I have come to. I will buy Canon paper. What made me by Hannemuhle before was that it produced exceptional results with my old Canon printer- only now, I realise, completley by fluke. I wasnt using any ICC profiles then. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

[Colin Southern]

Hi Tim,

In terms of colour accuracy the best solution is to have one made. If you can find one somewhere that covers your paper / ink / printer combination then great, but if not then having one made for you is relatively inexpensive (and a 1-off exercise for a given ink / paper / printer combination).

The other thing that the books don't tell you is that often a profile for one media can be quite close enough for another. Case in point - I had a custom profile made for a canvas stock that I used that turned out to be faulty ... producing the horrid washed out and muddied browns. In desperation I tried a profile for a premium luster 260gsm paper ... it worked absolutely fine.

[Davey]

ah sorry my fault for not being clear, that's the application bit. The previous bits is the driver settings to allow colour managed apps to control profiling. The set paper bit is done through application, in my case photoshop or illustrator mainly. Basically the driver overrides are fixed combos of paper types and appropriate profile for each setting. The canon paper profiles are

PT = Canon photopaper Platinum
PR= Canon photo paper pro plus II
GS/SG= Canon glossy or semi gloss
MT= Canon matte photopaper

And as you know there are several quality modes from 1 to 5 on the ip4600. Only 1,2,3 or 2,3, or 2 are available depending on the paper type set (in printer settings "media type" box). 1 is best but slow and only available on the likes of photo plus II but you will know this no doubt. Each paper profile has different version for each quality setting so the profiles are something like

PT2 = plat paper in quality setting "2" mode
PR1 = pro / plus II in quality 1 mode
PR2 = pro /pII in q2
PR3= pro /pII in q3
GS2 = gloss or semi in q2
GS3 = you guessed it gloss or semi in q 3
MT2 = Matte in 2 mode

When colour manage set to driver the media type and quality setting box forces appropriate settings. Eg. If you pick pro II paper and set quality to 2 it automatically uses the PR2 paper profile in the background to go with it. In manual using a colour managing application like pshop you can set some differently, ie. paper icc profile is not the corresponding one to the media type selected. I find little tweaking is needed on most paper though, just a matter of trying those settings to get a close match and work with the closest. I printed a load of menus on a new paper yesterday and worked fine but took 1 attempt to fix colour cast. Some of the casts are due to over heavy ink load for particular paper which I find brightness setting (light/normal/dark) and associated contrast and light/dark sliders work well. The colour balance bars I've only had to mess with once on one paper but was subtle cast to start with and I find changing paper profiles between the official canon ones did the trick mainly.

What application do you use for printing? Also my screen isn't hardware calibrated (just software for my eyes with several settings for lighting situations like day / night, lamp on /off) but its output matches colours on printers output and stuff done on other machines or at the printers so I know it's good enough. Depends on your colour vision though I guess and I do have quite sharp colour vision and recognise subtle changes which apparently I'm told is unusual for men (hmmm makes me question a few things hehehe).