[Tool] ChromIQ – a macOS and Windows GUI for ArgyllCMS printer profiling (v3.9.0)

[pkk]

Hello All,

I’ve been making profiles with an I1Pro and ArgyllCMS for several years using the LittleArgyllGUI. ChromIQ is much more capable so I expect to be using it now. I don’t mean to imply that I know much about color management though.

I’ve read this entire thread and made two profiles (attached). The 484 patch profile looks pretty normal to me but the 500 patch does not look right. Any opinions?

So I do have some questions.

I’ve always read the charts in one direction only, as I find it easier to make a smooth pass when I pull the instrument towards me. Should I have bidirectional turned off?

I have typically made a two page, letter size 924 patch 5 white 6 black 64 grey steps with a preconditioning profile of the same paper from the manufacturer. I do a lot of B&W printing. So which of pharmacist’s presets would best for me? And am I correct that these are run without a preconditioning profile? Or should I stick to my old method?

I remember that the original Argyll setup had you place a copy of AdobeRGB1998.icc in the working folder. I don’t remember the ChromIQ instructions having me do that. Did I miss anything?

Thanks Itsab1989 for this great project.

 

[itsab1989]

First of all thanks a lot for using the App and replying here. It really means a lot to hear that the work is not wasted.

Regarding your questions:

When you are measuring a chart that is randomized Argyll by default allows to read it in both directions and then automatically matches the reading to the direction that fits its expectations best. This usually works pretty well but if you read in only one direction anyway you can as well turn it off. You have to start from the side of the strips that has the letters in this case though. The other direction is not supported. If you want that you have to allow bi-directional.
Because of my own (very few) experiences - I did my first profiles on plain paper to try the process - I decided to suppress warnings for the measurements by default. You might want to turn them on again to get notified of possible misreading. Plain paper fired a warning for each strip which was very annoying but for photo paper this is much better and actually a good indicator. Maybe I change the default for this later - depends on feedback. But you can choose to set any settings that you like as default so you don't have to remember setting them again every time.

For the AdobeRGB profile: Argyll itself comes with a few profiles in its /ref folder. One of them is called ClayRGB. It is the exact same as AdobeRGB and just has a different name for legal reasons. You don't have to put it into your working folder when you are using ChromIQ because when you are building the profile with the app it sends the information about the location of this profile to colprof so it can do its calculations. When you choose another profile for this in the app this will then be respected instead of Adobe/ClayRGB.

I myself are no colormanagement expert either so I can't really answer your other questions. I had a look at the profiles you created and the one you consider to be better has a smoother surface than the other. I don't think that this is an indicator for good quality though because the profile should reflect what the printer / paper combination can reproduce which might not be perfectly smooth. But I might be wrong here. What is your exact concern? So maybe @pharmacist can give you a better answer.

He is also the right person to ask about the best approach to profiling your paper as he has much more experience with this. I personally only ever did a one-pass approach with my ColorMunki and to my eyes the results were good with a decently big target. But I did no scientific testing for this.

In a long session last night Knut and I implemented some improvements and we are at v3.10.9 now. Hopefully you never even ran into the issues he found and we fixed together but it should be worth updating anyway:

https://github.com/itsab1989/ChromIQ/releases

By the way: Is there anything missing in the app that you would consider to be useful? Or have you found a bug?
In this case please let me know. I can't add or fix things I am not aware of. Best way to do this are the two buttons in the app settings window. They will guide you right to Github where you will be presented with a form to share your thoughts. It is the most convenient way for me to solve those issues and keep an overview of everything.

Thanks a lot for your feedback again!

 

[pharmacist]

hi @pkk :

Best to have softproofing after creating the profile to see if the profile is correct or not, this is the softproofing of your faulty profile:

Are the patches randomized: if not choose the randomize button. I had terrible results with non-randomized patches, so my preset workflows are always randomized.

Your printers have multiple grey inks, so the TC9.24 preset target should already produce very neutral greys without a preconditioning profile to start with. Preconditioning will probably give only a small extra edge over the TC9.24, but most won't notice the extra improvement.

 

[itsab1989]

hi @pkk :

Best to have softproofing after creating the profile to see if the profile is correct or not, this is the softproofing of your faulty profile:

View attachment 18860

Are the patches randomized: if not choose the randomize button. I had terrible results with non-randomized patches, so my preset workflows are always randomized.

Your printers have multiple grey inks, so the TC9.24 preset target should already produce very neutral greys without a preconditioning profile to start with. Preconditioning will probably give only a small extra edge over the TC9.24, but most won't notice the extra improvement.

Do you think that could be an issue caused by wrong colormanagement when printing the target? I still have not heard from Canon regarding my problem with the printer driver and he is using a Canon printer as well. Though I do not know whether he is using macOS or Windows.

 

[pharmacist]

Actually I don't think about double profiling (known bug with MacOS and Airprint drivers that Apple tends to force upon you), because in this case you will only see a shift in hue, not the strang totally different colours you see in the above softproof. If I see the color strips the most likely problem are reading errors. Sometimes You can change the chartread argument -T into -T0.4 and enable error messages so you get a pop-up there are strip reading inconsistencies, because I believe this is disabled.

 

[pkk]

Thanks to Itsab1989 and Pharmacist for the quick replies and I will answer both of them here.

My questions about bidirectional reading and handling the AdobeRGB1998 profile are answered. Thanks.

More info about the problematic 500 patch profile. I use Windows and it was not double profiled. I was given 6 boxes of it in greeting card size so I would like to be able to use it but It has been a problem child paper since I got it. The paper is Red River Premium Gloss which apparently has been discontinued so no RR profile is available. When I read the patches I had to read several rows 3 & 4 times to get it done. My plan, now that I have guidance from Pharmacist, is to move on to some other papers that I really need to get profiled. I’ll come back to this one when I get more experience with ChromIQ.