On 12 Feb 2019, at 01:11, Graeme Gill <graeme2@argyllcms.com> wrote:
As a profile making type person, my natural inclination would be to say "profile your press, and use that :-)", but it really comes down to what your intention is. If your intention is to run a press to FOGRA51 conditions so that customers can do separations using the standard FOGRA51 profile, then it seems you aren't currently hitting that mark with your press, or that your evaluation conditions differ markedly from the ones FOGRA51 uses, or that perhaps FOGRA51 press conditions are out of the range possible with your setup.
Graeme Here’s an example of the problem: Using any data sets prior to 51 and 52 it was possible to make ICC profiles with different K generation and utilise them in prepress workflows them without the printed results looking any different to those separate using the generic profiles. So a black & white image using a max K FOGRA39 profile will proof identically to a standard conversion and print without grey balance issues. You cannot do this with the 51 and 52 data. If you build a profile in Argyll or i1Profiler from this data the results are terrible. There is no Yellow in the separations! The only workaround with Argyll for high GCR separations in 52 is to first convert using the ECI profile and then use a Device Link to generate the desired K ramp. There is no workaround with i1Profiler, it cannot produce an acceptable 52 profile. Even the generic ECI 52 profile produces results that our clients aren’t particularly happy with. The skin tone doesn’t have enough yellow. So we tend to use GMG’s ColorServer variant which does boost the Y. But, again, this causes more problems because it is easy to spot which images have been separated by which profile. Which means we are no longer able to fix problem images and then drop them seamlessly back into print workflows :( It’s a mess. -- Martin Orpen Idea Digital Imaging Ltd