Hello Chromix gentlemen!
I have recently discovered your special ColorThink software, and also the fantastic ColorWiki. Thanks for that ! I have seen some videos and pictures (here+Youtube) where you show wonderful fast gamut surface plot. Nice!
More than 10 years Im fighting with ICC on textile. Textile is a beast to calibrate and to profile well. I have developed nice couple of own XLS tables to have some analytical tools. They helped me much - Ive found a lot of systematic errors in my profiling workflow. Im examining data for erratic readings (even after averaging of 3 measurements I still have some). Im plotting them like “2D cuts” of the gamut, and usually examining in more than 1 direction.
But now I discovered your ColorThink !
To my question -
is ColorThink able to draw the “internal grid” of a gamut (or maybe line-connections between measurements) to see how regular the points inside are?
This is something that would help me really MUCH!
And having analyzed some foreign profiles… I think more people would need such tool too…
Yes, ColorThink Pro can show the mapping of colors that are inside the gamut of a profile. I guess you would have to think about what it is you would like to see. Obviously, vectors showing the movement of every single pixel in an image would be a jumbled mess. If you are working with measurement data, then displaying that in the Grapher, in effect, gives you the “internal grid” of a profile.
If you want to compare two measurements, drag them into the workflow, one after another, turn on dE, and graph the dE column. This will give you line-connections between the two points. Considering your purpose, you might also like to turn on the seldom-used “deltaE color” option in the Grapher. That will color-code the lines to let you know at a glance which are within your tolerances and which are out.
mapping is not what Im looking for. Im still talking about patch readings only. And no - I dont want to compare 2 or more readings. That gives me info about bad reading appearance but no info how to correct it.
On textile they are a HUGE problem. Until now I havent found a solution/software which can satisfactory read +correct textile measurements. My main problem are: erratic readings, too dark near-white readings, too flat dark readings. And then also a huge non-linearity above 80-90% tone value.
Im after a tool showing patch readings as points connected to curves or to a grid. In this way it is MUCH MUCH easier to identify the irregularities in readings because one can quickly see how the curves are “evolving”. I have some tools for visualizing this in Excel. Unfortunately, Excel is not able to draw real 3D graphs. So Im stuck by 2D cuts (like 0-100/0/0/0 , 0-100/10/0/0, 0-100/20/0/0, etc) which gives me a nice “plane view” for the readings.
It is sufficient for searching most of the bad readings + correcting them… but its time-consuming like hell.
Second, I have found that our textile inks have an very odd gamut shape with strong non-linearity above 80-90% tone value. Profiling software usually cannot handle such bowed curves. Interpolation algos are somehow fooled by that. I would need a 2500+ patches target to get everything right. But on textile that gives me many many wrong/irregular readings. So I decided to go for less readings … and to fill the gaps between them with math…
By manipulating (smoothing out) Lab coordinates of the readings I can get near perfect average Lab positions of the patches. Further Im using Excel to get parameters of perfectly smooth polynomial approximations. Then I use these polynomial curves to calculate all the missing unfeasible patch readings. That gives me wonderfully smooth “pseudo-readings” in the whole gamut. Putting them into profiling software give me fantastic results!! 8)
But going thru one 1200 patches reading and correcting them takes me days !!! I would like to have a tool for quicker and easier visualization.
Is ColorThink able to show line-connection between readings in some preset way?
No, ColorThink is not able to show line connections between points like you are asking. I have seen the method you are describing in the Esko software for Flexo printers. They take linearization readings and define the placement by using mathematical curves. I don’t know much about Esko myself, but our Curve3 software works with Esko curves and writes out our G7 curves as Esko PressSync curve codes. However, you can’t use Curve3 to convert to and from Esko curves as you would need to do.
Curve3 does a wonderful job of smoothing and you might consider it as a tool to get your textile curves into good G7 shape to begin with.
