Re: [Gimp-user] Color mismatch when an image is printed

[Pat David <patdavid gmail com>]

Hi James!

On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 2:59 PM James Moe <jimoe sohnen-moe com> wrote:

> On 09/22/2016 09:13 AM, Pat David wrote:
> > Did you also generate a profile for your printer?
>   How do I do that?
>   I'd search the online manual, except... There is no search function!
> Thus rendering the manual somewhat useless for finding specific topics.

http://imgur.com/a/mnhLn

The problem as I understand it (there are far smarter folks than I for
color management stuff here) is that we are talking mainly about a problem
of degrees.  Your uncalibrated monitor may or may not show you colors that
are representative of what they should be for a given colorspace.  So far
it may _seem_ ok to you, but the best you can hope for w/o calibrating or
profiling is that it looks close enough for you.  Apparently the "close
enough" has drifted recently for any number of reasons.

Pascal has a still relevant tutorial on display color profiling in linux:
https://encrypted.pcode.nl/blog/2013/11/24/display-color-profiling-on-linux/

If you have the hardware, you can use displaycal to do the calibration and
profiling: http://displaycal.net/

Basically, this will get you a profile for your monitor and hardware to
show you the correct colors.  At that stage you can be reasonably
comfortable that what you see on your calibrated hardware should look the
same on someone elses calibrated hardware (or at least really close).

The next problem is that you will need to print a reference target on your
printer, with your inks, and then use that reference print to generate a
profile for your printer.  This will allow you to use the profile for
soft-proofing your images prior to printing so that you can see what they
should look like when printed.  This is beyond the scope of a quick email,
but I'm hoping some folks on the list might have some better references to
post for you to follow...


>   I have some standard ICC profiles:
> CMYK:
>   un-/coated
>   web un-/coated
>   US web un-/coated
>   US sheetfed un-/coated
>
>   Would any of those be an appropriate default?

Maybe?  I doubt they would be any better than any other profile that isn't
generated from your printer and created by you.

pat