[Tool] ChromIQ – a macOS and Windows GUI for ArgyllCMS printer profiling (v4.0.0)

[itsab1989]

@itsab1989 Thank you very much for all your hard work. I am very very impressed. The program is very professional and slick.
Unfortunately I do not have a spectrophotometer since my i1Pro1 died few months back, to put it through it's paces. I am hoping to get another one soon.
@pharmacist a big thumbs up to you too for keeping at it in all earnest. Wish you all the best.
This newest development on the CR-30 is very interesting. I was wondering if there is any way to get strip mode working, however slow it may be? I am toying with the idea of mounting it on an XY table to automate it. In which case it can be slowww too and work. Experimenting with several profiles and workflows becomes very time consuming by hand. In theory an XY table should make it quite productive.

Thanks for the kind words! I have asked Claude to send it „rapidfire“ comands to measure what it could do at best. Conclusion: 3 measurements per second. You don’t want to do strip reading with this speed because there is a high chance the device does not land on the patch you want to measure even once.
I think that if you have the capability to make such an XY table work with the device you could probably really make this quite productive. You can fork ChromIQ and work with what is already in. I have made it so you can trigger the device with the spacebar as well because I thought this might reduce shake that might be introduced when pressing the devices button. So with such a table you would not even need a real strip reading mode. You „just“ (it is still easier said than done - I know) have to make the timing right. Move to patch 1, measure, patch 2, measure and so on

 

[itsab1989]

Hi all,

This is Arno, back from being kicked out because I was tagged as spam, likely because I send two replies shortly after each other. "It" seemingly even blocked my IP address, since I could not even send a message to an admin. Eventually, I managed to send something, somewhere, asking to be unblocked, but no avail. I'm now on a different IP address and created another account, using another email (sigh...).

Anyway, I really appreciate all the help and pleasant interactions here. Following what Sebastian recommended, I managed to use my scanner as a profiling device within ChromIQ, but since I don't have an ICC profile for my scanner, I simply assigned Adobe1998 and got a profile, which made the grey more neutral, but the principal R, G, B, C, M and Y were off. This was no surprise considering the lack of a calibration profile for my printer. Nonetheless, it seems it can be made to work using a profiled scanner, which can be done cheaply using a target, for example from Coloraid.de.

Anyway, since I do a lot of B&W, I followed the advice of Pharmacist, and started looking for a second hand i1Pro. After a bit of dabbling with AI, it seemed that the i1Pro series is much better than the "consumer" level devices as for example from Calibrate. In the end, I found a used i1Pro2 rev E for a good price with 18,000 seconds of usage, while AI "told me" that Xrite warrants their internal tungsten bulbs(?) for 100,000 seconds or so(?). So I purchased the thing, only to find the next day an add for a new, unused i1Pro2 rev E, for only a few bucks more. So now I have two, lol. I saw the video above that the CR30 is also under scrutiny now and communicating with ChromIQ, so this will be brilliant as an affordable solution. Seeing video's of the i1Pro in use, I do think that scanning will be significantly faster, so I have no regrets on the i1Pro purchases.

I'm now still on travels (hence the different IP...), and have two i1Pro's waiting for me at home and will report back when I managed to play with them (if I don't get banned again...). Meanwhile, playing around with ChromIQ it deeply impressed me for user-friendliness, and possibilities. Job extremely well done! Congrats and many thanks!

I was wondering though whether it would be better to use the original Xrite's i1Profiling software with the i1Pro2, and I do have an older version of the software which still recognizes the i1Pro2, but this will no longer be available with the next MacOS update apparently. I suppose that ChromIQ was written for a reason: Is it better than Xrite's i1Profiling software?

Thanks for all the inputs, even during my absence (...). I think I'm well on my way to create accurate profiles in-house now.

Arno

I am looking forward to hear from you when you made your first profiles with it. Thanks for the kind words also. This means a lot because my number one goal was to make it very user friendly while being versatile at the same time.
And Knut often pushed back on me to implement some more advanced features. I think we managed to keep a pretty good balance.
Still finding bugs to fix and introducing new ones in the process but I am working on improvements

I can’t really tell you whether ChromIQ is better than i1Profiler since I have never used it. And this was not really the reason I made this.
I have a Colormunki myself and the software for this device is very limiting. The i1Pro for sure is the better device overall but the Colormunki is limited by the software it is shipped with. And I knew that there was Argyll out there that many people love but I never understood how to use it with the command line. So the reason was to make it easy to use Argyll not to be better than i1Profiler. If someone considers it better in some ways though I take this compliment

 

[pharmacist]

The latest version supporting i1Pro2 is version 3.8.6. Not sure it still available at the X-Rite website. No license for your i1Pro2: no problem, just scan with i1Profiler and save as cgat txt file and use ChromIQ to generate the profile. I do this all the time with my non-licensed i1Pro2 devices.

With the latest versions of ChromIQ (showing the same visual between expected and measured values), why bother with i1Profiler.....and the built-in "smart" patch generator is terrible. I use the new ChromIQ patch generator that Knut has designed and this way superior in distributing the greys and near neutrals (very important for good neutral greys for a given paper/ink/printer combination). Also important: you can let ChromIQ have the patch area orientated that it is ergonomically placed on the paper for a better scanning experience withour i1Pro2: when completely inserted into the scanning jig, the movement between paper white (start and end point) is precisely confined, unlike the i1Profiler generated targets where you have to move around the paper and sometimes you cannot press the paper inside the jig. Below I show you want I mean with this (the target has been manipulated with PS to squeeze, stretch and move the whole patch area into a give size and position) for i1Profiler. The patches however are generated with the superior patch generator of ChromIQ. Notice the massive amount of greys and neaar neutrals in de last columns and the saturated colour edges (corners of the RGB colour cube) in the middle for maximum gamut coverage).

When the same amount of patches (550) would be generated with i1Profiler you would get this:

As you can see: just a fraction of greys and near neutrals......

 

[pharmacist]

@itsab1989 Thank you very much for all your hard work. I am very very impressed. The program is very professional and slick.
Unfortunately I do not have a spectrophotometer since my i1Pro1 died few months back, to put it through it's paces. I am hoping to get another one soon.
@pharmacist a big thumbs up to you too for keeping at it in all earnest. Wish you all the best.
This newest development on the CR-30 is very interesting. I was wondering if there is any way to get strip mode working, however slow it may be? I am toying with the idea of mounting it on an XY table to automate it. In which case it can be slowww too and work. Experimenting with several profiles and workflows becomes very time consuming by hand. In theory an XY table should make it quite productive.

Actually with some execercise you can easily scan 300 patches (about 1 CR30 page) in about 10 minutes time. That is: the standard created targets might be a bit too small in patch size, but in the past I have made targets with argyllcms and with some PS manipulation maximum size patches that are way easier to scan without errors:

Above my specially made (mirrored: because ArgyllCMS is from right to left) target for better scanning with the CR30; large randomized patches for a better scanning experience with the CR30 without errors. Because of the relative large body size of the CR30 the large patches gives you better visual estimation where the scanning eye is landing on a particular colour patch.