As reported in my last post, I am now trying out ‘Think’ inks in my Epson 1500W. Having just had printer profiles made for 3 papers using the Ink Express inks which I’ve now abandoned, I was a bit embarrassed to go back to the paper supplier for more profiles, so I turned to Profile Prism, which I haven’t used for several years. This is a DIY profiling program. The way it works is that a ‘target’, which is a page of colour patches, is printed and then put onto a flatbed scanner along with the supplied IT8 target, so that the two are scanned together. The software then measures the patches and generates the profile. It isn’t perfect because the scanner is not a proper calibrated measuring device, but in this case the profiles it produced were excellent. In fact the prints look better than those using the professionally made profiles. There is a small problem with the saturated reds which shows up in a test image of fruit and vegetables, where the red peppers and tomatoes are slightly lighter than they should be, but I can live with that. Greys are neutral and ‘memory colours’ like skin tones, blue sky and green grass are all accurate.
My previous experience with using Profile Prism with my 1290 printer was somewhat mixed. The initial profiles always produced prints with a yellow/brown colour cast. This had to be corrected by adding biases to the profile generation, which was rather subjective and involved a lot of printing and adjusting. But with the current inks the profiles haven’t needed any adjustment. I’ve now profiled 5 papers and if images are laid out together on a table the only differences are that ‘paper white’ varies with the paper and black is not as black on the matte papers.