I’m having a bit of a nightmare profiling an Epson Stylus Pro 9880, Following the software and using the i1 Pro 2 kit I’m getting a strange effect in some color gradients. its like a halo effect between light and dark areas. I have put below a link to a photograph of what i mean.
It can be mainly seen on her neck and in the transition between the reds to the oranges
I have made a couple of profiles using various targets and it seems to happen on all to a greater or lesser degree. I have also tried V2 and V4 profiles and I’m printing through Photoshop CS6.
Have also tested it by profiling a small ricoh office printer and the colours were great
A mystery! I love these.
I’d like to get to look at the profile you are using, and also (a scaled-down version of) your original image, so we can try to duplicate your setup here. ColorThink Pro might shed some light on what’s going on here.
I’ll report back to this thread what I find.
pat(at)chromix.com
Your profile shows an unusual concentration in the gamut around the darker, semi-saturated colors around the entire color range. If you look at the attached 3D gamut, we usually expect a good gamut volume to have a smooth wireframe representation all the way around. But your profile has some kind of girdle. A closer look shows that the colors are folding back on each other in this area.
The bottom line is that you have a bad profile. This profile will give you these harsh transitions all over the spectrum, not just in the flesh tones. My wild guess is that it’s due to a multi-page target, where one page was printed slightly different from the others? It could also be due to a hiccup in the measuring of the targets. So try measuring your targets again and make a new profile. If that does not improve things, you’ll want to print all new targets, measure and create a new target.
I’ll be a little surprised that this has to do with measuring problems. Modern profiling software and hardware like the i1Pro you’re using are very well established in their procedures these days. It’s pretty hard to make an egregious mistake and get away with it. The software will tell you to read the line over again or something. So even though you’re a newby, it’s pretty unusual for a profile to be made that behaves badly like this.
Here’s a video showing a look around the gamut in ColorThink’s 3D Grapher:
