[Tool] ChromIQ – a macOS and Windows GUI for ArgyllCMS printer profiling (v4.3.0)

[Im-back-Arno]

Hi all,

Following progress while I have a moment but still traveling.

@itsab1989 : I wouldn’t worry about currently 40 users. It’s still under development and changing too rapidly to be spread widely. There will be a large user-base for it once it’s more stable. You could possibly even consider eventually licensing it for commercial use to the x-rites, calibrites and paper manufacturers out there for many coffees . Retain free for non-commercial use only. That way, it will spread (because it’s free) and you might eventually make some money for all your efforts, while us hobbyists will still be able to enjoy the fruits of your work. This is the way some software companies bring in new paying users. For example, I’m using Autodesk Fusion for free for my hobbies, but when I would use it for my company, I would need to, and would, pay. ChromIQ seems to quite generously beat the options that i1Profiler is providing and software development in a corporate environment is silly expensive, so there could be commercial interest. They might want to add a shell with their logo on it, but do we care?

Anyway, with that said, I have yet another question: I recall reading about ink limit calibration, which is hidden but can be activated in the preferences (?). Do I want to do that? I could imagine that when switching from dense Epson paper to a spongy, say, fancy Hahnemühle photo rag, that the amount of ink that gets absorbed could differ. Hence, it seems to make sense to first determine what amount of ink creates 100% density for each cartridge, no? It could be enough to tell my R1900 whether it’s printing on glossy or matt, and it might be sufficient, but for off-brand papers it might matter more(?).

Arno

 

[itsab1989]

Hi Arno!

Actually I checked again yesterday and it seemed that I got the numbers wrong. The latest version at that point had a little over 100 downloads. That’s progress!

Today we released 4.3.0 which focused mainly on the report feature that Knut designed and as always should squeeze some bugs. Also as always once we decided to drop the beta tag immediatley another little issue appears and the first updates follow…
But my AI subscription runs out tomorrow I think and I will not re-subscribe for another month. Instead I will give it some time and collect some feedback.
There might be more things one could add but I am pretty confident that it gets its basic job done pretty well (and actually a lot more).
When a few things added up I might work on it again to fix and add things but for now I finally want to take the break that I planned to take so many times by now. And I have a feeling that the same is true for Knut to a degree. Such a project can be fun at times but also mentally draining. And as a side effect I could not use my computer for anything else for the last few weeks because it was running automated tests day and night.

I will not be able to license this app though because it relies on ArgyllCMS which is free and does not allow this. Which I think is fair. I mean although we built „just“ a GUI around this, extended the functions of it in some cases and had the help of Claude artificial intelligence and Knut real intelligence this was quite a lot of work. Argyll itself is… like 20 years old? And I might be wrong but I think Graeme Gill seems to have created this completely on his own with no such help. So it would feel weird to sell this to people which was never my plan from the beginning.
I had issues using the command line and Knuts script finally enabled me to create mir first own printer profile with Argyll and improved my prints a lot. His script seriously did not get enough praise for how good it is. But I think people who were comfortable with the command line had mostly already found a way to work with it and to most others even the script was too „scary“.
That’s why I wanted to make this GUI. And I am more than happy with it.

But since I have started I paid at least around 100€ for this project every month. In September I subscribed to the highest tier Claude account which was 200€ even and I bought the CR30 spectro which cost me another 60€. Of course this is in part a hobby and if I could not afford it I would not have spent all of this money. But I also drags you in somehow because once you have paid you want to use as much of it as you possibly can and you have to follow the rules of the AI company with their usage limits. This time we are at a good point to make a cut for now and take a break as I said.

When you are back from travelling and had some time to play with it I would ask you for a favour though (just if you want of course - please don’t fell pressured): You have a very nice blog on your website and if you are looking for a topic for a new post in that blog maybe you could share some of your experiences on how to improve your black and white printing. This would make me very happy!

Regarding your other question: the calibration function is mainly useful for true CMYK (+N) printers and not for consumer printers. Of course they are using cyan, magenta and yellow as well but are considered RGB printers. I have added those options for completeness but I had no real way to test them and you probably would not really benefit from it. But more experienced users here might know more about this.