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Color Management for Your Digital
Printing Needs
In a Nutshell…
I offer custom ICC printer profiles – a low-cost solution
for professional photographers and others who want to get the
most accurate colors they can from their printers. I can
create a Color profile for any combination of RGB printer and paper you might
be using. And if you are using a printer that supports a special mode for
black and white printing, I can create an Advanced Black and White profile, as
well. A color profile costs $25, and an Advanced Black and White profile costs $15. And delivery time is usually less than one day! Check out the menu links shown at the top of the page
for an overview of the steps you need to take to acquire a custom ICC printer profile from this website and use it successfully in your digital printing workflow.
Why Bother With a
Custom Profile?
There are lots of “generic” printer
profiles already available from numerous sources. Often, these profiles are provided by the manufacturer along with the printer
drivers. Sometimes these profiles will work okay for you – but just as
often, they will give you quirky and unsatisfactory results.
The problem is…
despite precision manufacturing, every printer is not exactly the same. In
the 2nd edition of their book, "Real World Color Management," authors Bruce
Fraser, Chris Murphy, and Fred Bunting, describe what it feels like when you
walk into an electronics store showroom and see dozens of TVs all tuned to the
same station. What becomes readily apparent is the wide variation in color
between all the TV sets -- even those of the same make and model . There
are similar differences in the results you get from printers, too. Add to
this the enormous variation in computers, software, and operating environments,
and it becomes easy to understand why it is possible to get very different
results from the same make and model of printer. This situation is even further
exacerbated by the rapid proliferation of third-party Fine Art Papers.
Nope... using an ICC printer profile is definitely NOT
a situation where “one size fits all" -- and this is becoming more of a
reality every day.
If you
want to get the very best color -- or linear shades of black and white
-- from your printer; if you want the
images you print to look as close as possible to the images you see on
your monitor – then you need to be using a custom ICC printer profile.
Herein lies the strength of a custom profile that I can build for you…
It will be created from the output of the unique combination of
your
computer system and your printer. Your
specific printer inks (even third-party inks), in combination with the
specific papers of
your
choice, printed on your printer, with your computer system – these are the most important factors that will
determine how the profile will be created to best suit your unique
printing needs.
The
profile I will provide should give you excellent color or grayscale results that have
been carefully calculated based on the information you provide about
your specific printing and operating environment. This is the
power of a custom ICC printer profile – and no generic or canned profile
can deliver printed results with color and tonal range as accurate as what you will get
from the custom profiles that I can provide. Period!
--- Rick
Ashford
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