[Tool] ChromIQ – a macOS and Windows GUI for ArgyllCMS printer profiling (v3.8.0)

Some of the targets he mentions are part of his Argyll Printer Profiler script:

https://github.com/soul-traveller/Argyll_Printer_Profiler

I‘ll attach the other ones here.

thanks, at the moment busy at work, I will have a look later and report back.

The zip file was flawed somehow. This one should be better.

Hi! Thanks four feedback!

For the printing issue: are you printing with the macOS printer dialog option or the the other built in print menu? You can change between those two in the settings window on macOS. It is pretty hard to nail this down. I tried back and forth to find a solution for this and for my Epson ET 8550 it seemed to work (I measured patches of a testchart I printed with different programms and in ChromIQ the results were the same). But I am not on Tahoe so maybe that can make a difference.

For the other issue: where did it go wrong exactly? Do you have the quality report saved? Which strips should it have flagged and which were actually flagged? Do you habe a screenshot or the log file maybe? This would help.

Edit:

This is Claudes take on issue 1 so far:

For Issue 1 (most useful first):

1. The Pro-1000 PPD + option list. Run and paste:


lpstat -p # to get the queue name

lpoptions -p <QUEUE> -l

1. and grab the PPD at /etc/cups/ppd/<QUEUE>.ppd. I want to see what Canon

calls its colour-matching / colour-correction option and its "off" value.

2. A captured "good" job. This is the gold standard. Put the queue on hold,

print a chart from Print-Tool (the working case), then inspect the spooled

job's options in /var/spool/cups/ (the c##### control file). That tells us

exactly which key=value Print-Tool sets that we're missing.

3. chromiq.log after a print using the native-dialog setting — it logs the

resolved printSettings and whether the no-CM lock verified, which tells me if

the PPD scan found Canon's option or not


Edit 2:

New update is on the way. It now pulls a few more strings to disable colormanagement that Claude considered useless before. I hope it helps. Please report back!
But for the guided refinement I have to know where it breaks exactly.

Please do so! And also try the latest version of ChromIQ. I hope this will improve things as well.

Sorry for your inconveniences btw.

Edit:

Just dug out my Canon Pro 300. ChromIQ 3.8.6 seemingly did not really fix it. At least in the pronter driver the colormanagement was set to perceptual instead of off. Claude figure something out thet worked but once I chose another printer the colormanagement was no longer set to off. Need to figure this one out…

Edit 2:

Setting the settings in the driver does not really work for Canon somehow - it is not cooperating. But I tried printing the same chart with the macOS printer dialog and the ChromIQ print dialog. The latter seems to work. So I am making this the default again. But it seems you have to select the borderless version of the paper size you want to print on and set extension to 0. If I choose regular A4 it shrinks it down. Trying to force it to 100% did not make it better but it enabled the printer colormanagement again. This is really frustrating and I am wasting a lot of time and paper here. I honestly don't know if I want to maintain this app any more. It is costing me time and money and it causes frustration.

Long live macOS not about color management...... ironically Apple was the cradle of graphical programs and color management.....but it is just terrible now....no problems with the Windows version here at all.

So true. Just playing around with it again. The print-tool that was mentioned has the same issues. If I call the printer drivers color settings once then they are correct and greyed out. Clicking abort and immediately opening the same options window again makes the options available again and pre-set to the wrong options. So if printing with this tool works it would have been better to leave the macOS print dialog the default and hope that the user trusts the tool and doesn't check for the correct color settings because it seems that checking without actively changeing anything DOES change the settings by accident.

@CSP @pharmacist

It is so weird.... But I just printed this way and it worked. Right size and CM off.

The problem is MacOS tending to force their Airprint driver (havoc with color management) upon each upgrade with the OS and remove the proprietary Canon or Epson driver. That is the reason why many years ago I sold my iMac 5K Retina machine in favour of a Ryzen Windows machine and my problems were gone.

This is also true but it is not the case here. I made sure that those are the correct drivers. But it still does not want to behave… I added notes here and there that the user should close those windows with the OK button. Hope this helps. But for that print-tool app that was mentioned the behaviour is exactly the same.