Do you know which kind of fabric is less problematic with “normal” spectros?

This is the sort of thing you can eyeball fairly easily if you have samples. Look at a (printed) sample under a single point light source, such as a bare bulb in an otherwise darkened room. Drape the fabric over your hand so there're all sorts of angles between the light, the fabric, and your eyeball. Aside from actual shadows, is there any significant variation in color? If so, you'll need a spectrometer with carefully-chosen geometry. If not, anything will do. And, of course, "significant" is to your own eyeball...you might be happy with something somebody else would consider problematic, or you might be disappointed with something somebody else thinks isn't worth worrying about.

In which colors/hues did you have the biggest problems?

I'd be surprised if something like this depends on hue angle. If it's a property of the actual printed fabric, that would suggest that there's some significant difference in bronzing types of effects between the different inks...not something I'd at all expect. More likely would be that some hues lie outside the gamut of some element of your workflow, or that your workflow is otherwise somehow flawed. b&

On Mar 10, 2016, at 9:45 AM, Claas Bickeböller <lists@bickeboeller.name> wrote:

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Aside from actual shadows, is there any significant variation in color?

shadows darken a sample and as color is 3-dimensional I don’t get your point.

Sorry; I could have been a bit clearer. I mean cases where a fold of the fabric is directly casting a shadow on another portion of the fabric, causing no light at all to reach the shadowed portion. Yes, of course; the shadows cast by a thread on a neighboring thread in a flat sample are the biggest problem -- and that's what I'm suggesting can be reasonably eyeballed. If you've got a not-flat sample and you see significant variation in color, a typical inexpensive consumer-level print spectrometer is not going to have the right geometry to measure it. b&

Am 10.03.2016 um 17:59 schrieb Ray Cheydleur <RaymondCheydleur@xrite.com>:

If so, you'll need a spectrometer with carefully-chosen geometry. If not, anything will do.

...

Sorry, disagree. When measuring textiles (or any other textured and/or uneven material) the shadows produced by a single-angle illumination are the biggest issue. —— Like so many things there is an element of truth in both positions…

There are a number of fairly smooth inkjet fabrics that can be color managed quite well with either a large aperture 0:45 or 45:0 device or with a device in scanning mode where the “virtual aperture” combined with suitably larger patches solves the same issue.

The more „paper-like“ (=smooth surface, though paper isn’t perfectly smooth either) a substrate is, the less problems you have with 45°:0° or 0°:45°, agree.

Class is correct though that at some point changing geometry is the best answer – though I’d hardly say the “biggest issue”. Like many non-paper substrates when you move to other substrates each comes with a host of challenges of which measurement geometry is only one of many.

Ok, let’s not make it too rigorous which issue is the biggest. We agree that for any sample and application there are more and less appropriate choices with different pro’s and con’s. I think the baseline was understood. Claas