Crane Museo Max ICC Profile

[TimothyFarrar]

I'm in the process of testing out the Crane Museo Max paper using the ICC profile (MuseoMAX_Epson4000.icm) from their website for the Epson Stylus Pro 4000. I'm printing using Photoshop CS2 on MacOSX. While the paper is great, the print output simply looks horrible (looks like a profile problem) -- complete lack of detail in the shadows, nearly everything dark goes to black, and the colors are off. I do have a fully color calibrated workflow, and the soft proofing matches the printer output.

So I tried all the rendering intents, tried the blackpoint settings for those also, and no luck. The best settings seem to be the Perceptual with Blackpoint comp on.

I've had really great results with other matte paper, such as paper from Epson and the Hahnemuhle Photo Rag which looks great using the Perceptual rendering intent using their ICC profile -- full detail in the shadows, colors spot on.

Completely out of options, I did a test print using the Hahnemuhle Photo Rag profile on the Museo Max paper. Sure enough the colors are off (as expected) but the detail came back in the shadows! This seems to be a sign of a problem in the Museo Max factory profile when I get better results using a profile for the wrong paper.

I really like the Museo Max paper, no OBEs, no flaking like the Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, but it is 100% useless without a good color profile. Anyone have one?

One other thing I have noticed is that Crane gives a ICM instead of an ICC, (ICM being a Microsoft ICC knockoff right?). Perhaps the ICC has better information for the Perceptual Rendering Intent?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

- Timothy Farrar

[TimothyFarrar]

I think I did track the problem down. Looking at the difference of the Hahnemuhle and Crane ICC profiles, the Crane profile has a media black point specified, the Hahnemuhle doesn't, also when looking at the 3D graphs for the intent-0 (perceptual intent), the Crane 3D graph floats above the {0,0,0} black point (at its non-zero media black point), while the Hahnemuhle profile with no specified black point specified, touches the {0,0,0} black point.

So in english, my guess is that by including a non-zero media blackpoint, the Crane ICM profile is causing the Adobe ACE color conversion to clip those blacks that are darker than the media blackpoint. Where as in the Hahnemuhle profile, the perceptual intent maps all the blacks into the output gamut of the paper.

Anyone have any suggestions of a good place to get custom color profiles done where they have a really good understanding of this type of problem?

[colourperfect]

Timothy,

I think .icc and .icm are interchangeable, certainly Windows can work with either. The profiles I generate are .icc and work across platforms. Although from what I understand some older versions of MacOS need profiles to 'be converted' from the current ICC standard.

I think the issues you are describing may relate to the shadow performance of the papers. Matte paper (no matter the printer) is capable of less shadow detail than gloss or lustre paper. Some printers are linearised better (Epson 4800, 7800 etc) and are there better at extracting what shadow detail there is.

Also you need to consider the optimum inking levels of the papers. Some non-epson papers definitely benefit from less ink. The excess of inks sometimes causes poorer shadow detail and sometimes pooling.

The inking or color density levels can be optimised prior to profiling the paper by printing out wedges at different paper settings and ink densities.  

It is my understanding that the media black point for profiles of any paper are relative. The settings relate to how the colour rendering engine translates from the working colour space to the paper gamut space.

If you would like me to look at the two profiles you are talking about then feel free to email them to me.

Ian

http://profiles.colourperfect.co.uk