[Scribus] ICC Profiling software for Linux/Windows machine

[Peter Linnell]

Christoph,

please see my comments in-line.

On Wed, 2003-06-04 at 11:41, Christoph Schoenherr wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> Anybody out there who could share her/his experience in using ICC 
> printer and monitor profiles under Linux, which were produced 
> with a Windows application like Monaco EZ or Colorvision 
> PrintFix?

Have you seen the littlecms docs I wrote here? :
http://www.atlantictechsolutions.com/scribusdocs/cms.html
and
http://www.atlantictechsolutions.com/scribusdocs/lcms/moncal.html

Please read those carefully. Marti Maria of littlecms was kind enough to
proof them for accuracy.

Yes, I have compared the ones I made with Praxisoft and Monaco EZ. If
and this is the IF, you have the same gamma setup and the video driver
handles LUT's the same way a Win32 driver handles them, then they will
be pretty close. The quality of the video driver comes into play here.
It is my experience ATI cards in general are too bluish in the defaults
and you need to balance the monitor settings carefully.

The first step is to get the gamma to match your Windows settings very
carefully. the littlecms profiler is better in this respect, compared to
Adobe Gamma IMO. 

> 
> I've tried to profile my printer with VueScan's built-in printer 
> profiler, but the results are disappointing.
> So now I'm considering ordering one of these expensive 
> measurement tools, but I'm not sure if the following could work:

Printers are_by_far the most difficult to profile accurately on any
platform, as paper type and variability in inks makes a big difference.
IMO,  measuring printer output with any kind of accuracy requires one of
the packages for Gretag-Macbeth or similar with their color suites. 
Bring lots of money. The measuring devices for printers are far more
expensive than montitor profilers.

While CUPS can print in real CMYK mode, many common ink jets are still
RGB devices in the sense their drivers expect RGB data. The good part is
I think it is possible to use the CUPS CMYK mode with desktop inkjets to
simulate common commerical print profiles like SWOP and similar standard
press profiles ones used in Europe.  

On a PC, previously, the only package which did this well was Adobe's
Press Ready, which also like Ghostscript was a PS3 RIP. This is
something I have tinkered with and will add some notes when I update the
cms docs.

The one "generic" CMYK profile which seems to work well for me is the HP
Color Smart profile which comes with Pagemaker 6.5 and 7. When I use
this as the printer profile in Scribus, I find the screen to print match
pretty close for a "generic" printer profile with my HP inkjet. 

If you are using a simple inkjet, the other way is to forget printer
profiles stay in a RGB workflow. Keep your images in RGB and use the
GIMP print drivers to adjust printer output to the screen. This is why
the GIMP drivers were built in the first place.

As for printing direct with color management and a "real" CMYK printer
like an Adobe Extreme RIP or EFI Fiery, this is something I have just
begun to test. A client has been kind enough to allow me to do some
testing with Scribus in a real pre-press enviroment. 


> Printing out the test sheet from Scribus or Gimp with the CUPS 
> driver and default settings. Measuring the sheet in Windows 
> (with which profiling software?) and getting an ICC profile. 
> Using this ICC profile within Schribus. Same for the monitor. My 
> Scanners are already well profiled with lcms.

> For now I'm working on a Linux-only machine. Is there a 
> possibility to get proper printer profiles without getting into 
> Windows?
> 
Almost.. Marti Maria has done a great job with littlecms. It has
improved greatly in the last couple of versions. I think he is trying to
add a printer profiler in the next version of littlecms.

Having a measured print profile IMO is less important if the printer is
local and you can use the GIMP print driver adjustments to make more
accurate screen to print matches. Where a measured print profile is more
important to me for examaple is when you are trying to simulate a proof
to a commerical press which might not be local.

CMS on Linux is in its infancy. When Franz started Scribus, I thought
color management on Linux was something which would takes years to
enable. I quite pleased with the progress so far.

Hope that helps,
Peter