[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.

 

[Im-back-Arno]

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!

View attachment 19323

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.

Hi Sebastian,

I didn’t know the history of Argyll, nor its limitations regarding use. In my ignorant mind I thought that also i1Profiler must have been built on it. Alas, no ROI then, so I’ll buy you a coffee . I’ve done a decent amount of programming in my time (Assembler, Basic, Visual Basic, Pascal and a bit in C) so tend to think that I understand what it takes, but I never had the luxury of AI to help with that. What you (with the help of others) pulled together is truly impressive though, AI or not, and I really do appreciate it very much that it is available to me and just at a time when I decided to turn some of my work into printed form. Respect and hats off to you and everyone who has helped!

Of course I can, and will, write about it on my blog, even when I don’t think my website has a lot of reach. I’m also well connected to MrLeica (google that) who has much more reach, as well as Alain Oguse, who seems to be well connected to the QTR world. I’ll try to do some PR where I can. ChromIQ deserves it! Perhaps you can consider publishing an article about ChromIQ in a suitable magazine or journal as well(?).

Anyway, I’m itching to be back home and find time to properly dig in. For sure I’ll provide feedback here about my findings from an end-user viewpoint.

Thanks again and, yes, take some quality time with your family!

Arno

 

[know]

Hi All !

Now that the community, and the world, has the awesome capabilities of ChromIQ available, with a myriad of pre-created chart presets, I would like to challenge the community to help out to verify the quality of the most important presets and their differences, so that everyone can learn from how certain differences in focus in the patch sets in a chart affects the result on paper, and that we all become confident in what gives the best results without overdoing number of pages or overdoing certain traits of a patch set.

For example, how many steps of Near-neutral double-rings are good enough, so that patches can be used on other things than filling unnecessary number of patches into the grey-steps (which demands a lot of patches).
I have an example here: Previously, in other posts on the forum, also associated with my old Argyll_Printer_Profiler script, several people reported great results using the TC9.18 target with Spyderprint greys using around 1260 patches (one example in this post done by pharmacist: post-148565). That target had 16 steps of near-neutral greys with two rings.
The preset in ChromIQ called "i1Pro · A4-1944p-3pages-Portrait-w7.5mm-(expert quality)-Real World Target-by Pharmacist", which has ben verified to give great results by both @pharmacist and Arno (@Im-back-Arno), if I remember correctly, uses 31 steps of near-neutral greys with two rings. I would argue, though not proven yet, that 22 to 24 steps of near-neutral greys with two rings is more than enough to give acceptable results without wasting patches on grey-steps that could be used on other parts of the chart patch set, especially given the good results from the TC9.18 target with Spyderprint greys with 1260 patches.

That was my theory when making several of the patch sets included in ChromIQ, but not verified, and begs to be answered through verification tests.

Specifically looking at the differences between
"i1Pro · A4-1944p-3pages-Portrait-w7.5mm-(expert quality)-Real World Target-by Pharmacist" (left in the comparison image below)
and the other similar preset supplied
"i1Pro · A4-1944p-3pages-Portrait-w7.5mm-Uniform 11x11x11-Edge Emphasis" (right in the comparison image below),
several questions would be really nice to get answers to, which I go into below...

Here is a comparison of the two presets patch distribution, using the "Show patch distribution 3D" tool in ChromIQ:

The key differences:

Preset Name (Target) / Characteristics	i1Pro · A4-1944p-3pages-Portrait-w7.5mm-(expert quality)-Real World Target-by Pharmacist	i1Pro · A4-1944p-3pages-Portrait-w7.5mm-Uniform 11x11x11-Edge Emphasis
No. of patches	1944	1944
Main shape	10x10x10 Cube (1000 patches)	Uniform 11x11x11 Cube (1331 patches)
Grey steps	32 steps near-neutral grey with 2 rings + 32 neutral greys (572+32=604 patches)	24 steps near-neutral grey with 2 rings + 37 neutral greys (432+37=469 patches)
Edges, corners and extremes	Only Corner focus with 48+18=66 patches, not for all edges.	Strong distributed edge emphasis (144 patches)
Additional features	- Strong addition of Skin tones (144 patches) - Additional Highlights and Shadows (12 patches) - Rest of patches distributed across various generators (Oceans, Foliage, Sunrises, Flamingos, Pastels): 24+24+24+24+18=114 patches	- Cube with uniform distribution of patches
Summary:	The reduced cube dimension of 10x10x10 and less edge definition, compared to the other preset, gives 331+78=409 patches more to use for additional focus on grey steps, skin tones and corner extremes (including black and white), and distributes the rest unevenly using the focused generators. Possibly giving an advantage for images with people in them.	The one higher cube dimension and full coverage of edges gives an evenly distributed patch set and good edge-definition for general use, giving no special consideration to a particular feature of an image (such as skin colors). The grey steps are lower than the other preset, but still significantly higher than the well tested TC9.18+spyderprint greys (24 steps is smack in the middle between 16 and 32 steps).

My questions are:
1. How much better, if at all visible, is 32 steps near-neutral grey with 2 rings compared to 24? How much is good enough for color prints versus black and white prints? Can one see a difference between them, or is 24 steps sufficient for expert quality prints?

2. Is there a clear visible advantage for images with people in them using the 10x10x10 cube with added focus on skin-tone-patches, compared to the uniformly distributed 11x11x11 cube?

3. Is there a visible difference having stronger edge definition for the Uniform 11x11x11 cube preset?

4. With some extra Highlights and Shadows for the "Real World Target-by Pharmacist", is that visible on print comparing the two?


I would be really interested to see this type of comparison for several patch sets, especially those most interesting for users, so that everyone could get a better understanding of what is good enough for their use when selecting profiles in ChromIQ, and also enable users to better build chart presets that suit there needs, knowing how certain changes in the patch editor will affect the resulting prints...

I hope the enthusiastic users of this forum can help out and make such comparisons, providing the scientific results for all of us to benefit.


Other comparisons that could be done too:

"i1Pro · A4-1296p-2pages-Portrait-w7.5mm-(medium quality)-Real World Target-by Pharmacist"
vs.
"i1Pro · A4-1296p-2pages-Portrait-w7.5mm-Uniform 9x9x9-Edge Emphasis"


"i1Pro · A4-648p-1page-Portrait-w7.5mm-(standard quality)-Real World Target-by Pharmacist"
vs.
"i1Pro · A4-648p-1page-Portrait-w7.5mm-Uniform 6x6x6-Edge Emphasis"


"i1Pro · A4-1944p-3pages-Portrait-w7.5mm-(expert quality)-Real World Target-by Pharmacist"
vs.
"i1Pro · A4-3888p-6pages-Portrait-w7.5mm-14x14x14-Skintones-Edge Emphasis-Plus"


"ColorMunki · A4-300p-1page-Landscape-w9.0mm-TC3.00 Target-by Pharmacist"
vs.
"ColorMunki · A4-300p-1page-Landscape-w9.0mm-TC3.00 Equivalent Target (ChromIQ Editor)"
vs.
"ColorMunki · A4-306p-1page-Portrait-w10.0mm-Slow Reading Speed"

Cheers,
Knut