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
