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GretagMacbeth Color Expertise

May 15, 2006 Authors: Erik Vlietinck With the Eye-One Pro Photo bundle comes a copy of Eye-One Match 3.x. This is GretagMacbeth’s entry-level semi-professional profiling application. Eye-One Match is a unified software suite, a one-window approach, to measuring targets, saving measurement files, and creating profiles for every device in your workflow. Eye-One Match profiles monitors, scanners, cameras, printers and with an optional hardware module, even beamers.

Eye-One Match excels at ease-of-use and guiding the user through the process. However, you can only do what the program will allow you to do, which is create profiles and save them. You can also save the measurement files, but creating new targets is impossible, and so are a number of other things, which are very much possible with GretagMacbeth’s flagship application ProfileMaker Pro 5.0.5. I had the pleasure of reviewing the most complete, the Packaging version.

While Eye-One Match 3.6 enables users to quickly create accurate profiles, the only way to measure a colour and compare it with others --as one example of what you would like to do-- is through the freeware application Eye-One Share. Eye-One Share is based on the open (XML-based) CxF standard, aimed at communicating about colour without ambiguity. Eye-One Share is great if you want to “play” with colours --even Pantone colours-- create colour harmonies, measure, evaluate and compare spot colours, and much more, but it is not primarily intended to measure two colours and then determine their deltaE value using whatever deltaE system you would prefer (CMC, E94...).

In other words, and to cut a long story short, the basic package delivered with the Eye-One Pro spectrophotometer is complete and feature-rich, but there may be circumstances when it’s just not enough. That’s when ProfileMaker Pro 5.0.5 jumps in. ProfileMaker Pro 5.0.5 allows you to create a colour workflow so that all devices can be profiled in an environment where profiling is done semi-continuously or continuously. ProfileMaker Pro 5.0.5 is needed for service bureaus, printers, professional photographers, and environments where multi-colour, Hexachrome, Generic Output Profiling (GoP) and other such more esoteric requirements are business as usual.

ProfileMaker Pro 5.0.5 is a modular colour management solution. It includes the ProfileMaker application, ProfileEditor, ColorPicker, and MeasureTool. I’ll start with the latter. MeasureTool is the application with which targets and spot colours are measured using the Eye-One Pro spectrophotometer. It is also the tool which will calibrate the monitor (calibrate, not profile), compare colours, average profiles (useful when the device is subject to drift over time), and finally create test charts.

Indeed, the ProfileMaker Pro 5.0.5 solution allows you to create your own test targets and measure them with a whole range of measuring devices. MeasureTool will guide you through the process of each of its features, but will not take you by the hand as Eye-One Match does. MeasureTool --being a component of the ProfileMaker Pro suite-- is not for amateurs. It is for professionals who know enough about colour management not to need guidance from the beginning to the end. Having said that, I must admit the software suite has a very complete and handy help system that you access through a common web browser.

While calibrating and measuring is easy enough, the Test Chart Generator is somewhat more complex by nature. If MeasureTool is part of ProfileMaker Pro 5.0.5 Packaging, you will have the option of generating test charts for any output device. Even if your license is less generous, there are a couple of ways to create a new test chart. The easiest is to create a test chart based on an existing reference. GretagMacbeth includes a large number of those reference files with the software, so you can choose from a number of standard test charts. Each test chart having been optimized for a specific type of measuring device, the choice boils down to about two dozen charts to select from.

If that is not to your liking, you can also generate linearization charts (to linearize or calibrate --not profile-- your printer), or create a test chart from scratch. The latter involves choosing a number of patches, or pages, or even sheets. Test charts always relate to a measuring device, and MeasureTool supports the Eye-One, Eye-One iO, Spectroscan, IcColor, and two X-Rite spectrophotometers (but not the Pulse). However, if you have a reference file from a third party, and your measuring device supports the layout of their test chart, you can just open the reference and start from there --there’s no need to build a new test chart for that.

You create new test charts whenever you feel the default test charts are not enough for your purposes. While you can generate test charts for any device, including your monitor and scanner, the most important reason why you would choose to do so, is that your printer needs more patches to profile accurately, or that your multi-colour device is not covered by the default charts included with the software.

You can’t create completely new types of test charts with MeasureTool, however, and few desktop publishers, prepress pros or photographers will feel the need to do so.

MeasureTool is the preparation to what you will do in ProfileMaker. While you can measure targets in ProfileMaker too, doing so in MeasureTool is more efficient, especially when you’re measuring large test charts. MeasureTool also allows you to measure spot colours and compare them, and average existing profiles.

ProfileMaker Pro 5.0.5 Packaging has a toolbar with six buttons. These apply to profiling a monitor, scanner, camera, printer, multi-colour device, and device link. The colour management workflow with ProfileMaker Pro 5.0.5 can be simple: you just profile your device using the ProfileMaker component in the suite and don’t bother about MeasureTool. If you need more control over what exactly gets measured and the measurement process itself, you will use MeasureTool to measure and ProfileMaker to process the measurement data.

In some cases, you will just use ProfileMaker by itself. With scanner targets, for example, there is little need to first pass by MeasureTool, because the standard IT8 target reference files have already been grouped together in the appropriate folder in the ProfileMaker application suite folder. But if you’re going to use a target that nobody heard about in the first place, and a reference file for the target is missing, you will pass by MeasureTool first, measure the target completely --perhaps even patch by patch-- and then create a reference file from those measurements.

Only then will you use ProfileMaker to start the profiling process for the scanner. The Printer button will allow you to create RGB or CMYK printers, including printing presses and inkjet proofers. The Multicolor button is targeted at profiling output devices that can handle up to 10 colours, including Hexachrome. The Packaging version also has GoP capabilities, meaning you can create Generic Output Profiles.

With the help of GretagMacbeth GoP you can replace the colours in an existing ICC profile and thus save a great deal of time and money associated with re-profiling from scratch. You print the test chart once, measure it and generate one ICC profile. Then you can calculate this ICC profile, without having to print or measure it again, for other print jobs on the same press in Generic Output Profiler with new settings. Obviously, GoP is closely linked to multi colour profiling.

Finally, if your colour management workflow frequently demands that files like photographs are managed directly from one device to another, a device link profile can automatically link those colour spaces and gamuts together, saving time in the process. With ProfileMaker Pro 5.0.5 and its associated software components, you are not restricted to creating ICC profiles only. With ProfileEditor, for example, Photoshop Colour tables can be created very easily as well.

Especially desktop publishers, using Adobe InDesign CS2 or QuarkXpress will like this capability, as will photographers.

Besides immediate calculation of an ICC profile, ProfileMaker also allows delayed calculation of a number of profiles of all three device classes, one after the other in a batch processing sequence. For printer profiles, for instance, you can perform Batch Profiling with a number of different separation settings. You only have to load your reference and measurement files once. For this purpose, the settings for calculating each profile are held and stored in a Batch window.

Of course, ProfileMaker Pro 5.0.5 will allow you to fine-tune separation settings for CMYK printers. I couldn’t test this feature as all inkjets I have available for testing and reviewing are controlled as RGB printers.

ProfileMaker Pro 5.0.5 has three gamut mapping variants: LOGO Chroma Plus, LOGO Classic and LOGO Colorful. The latter is new to ProfileMaker 5.x while the Classic method exists the longest. I tested both Chroma Plus and Colorful, and found the colours splashing off the paper, especially with the Colorful variant. Colours were brilliant, deeply saturated and still natural-looking with this variant. Not surprisingly, it is the best choice for photography.

Chroma Plus was somewhat more modest in its display of saturation, but it still showed more brilliance and saturation than was possible with the profiles delivered as a standard with each inkjet printer you buy. None of the profiles I created with GretagMacbeth’s solution showed colour problems, as I experienced with the large target measurement using the ColorVision PrintFIX Pro. On the contrary, whereas the default inkjet profiles showed a distinct magenta colour cast, the ProfileMaker profiles were right on the dot --and that’s what profiling is done for in the first place.

The ProfileMaker bundle comes with two more modules: ProfileEditor and ColorPicker. With ProfileEditor you can edit profiles, perform post-linearization, create a colour profile workflow, and adjust the settings in a profile so flaws in photographs and other images are handled by a profile rather than with the image editor’s functionality.

Finally, ColorPicker is a tool for converting custom colours into device colours using ICC profiles. Gray, RGB and CMYK output profiles are supported, as are MultiColor profiles with up to 10 channels.

PANTONE colour tables are supplied for coated, uncoated and matte paper, enabling you to measure your colours or by entering the CIELAB value of one of your colours manually. ColorPicker provides you with the CMYK, RGB or MultiColor combination closest to your own colour for your specific output process.

You can optimize the calculated device color even more by visually adjusting it or automatically calculating the smallest delta E value.
The CIELAB values, unedited and edited device colour values of one of your own colours are displayed in ColorPicker in true colour. Two independent gamut warnings identify any custom colours that are outside the device and/or the monitor colour space. ColorPicker colour tables can be saved as ICC Named Color Profiles, used directly in iQueue for proofing custom colours, or exported to an Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, or Macromedia FreeHand format.