So, I've made profiled photos of some watercolors that are a rather good on-screen match to the originals. And prints on photo paper are very close, as well, though the color of the watercolor paper on the print is noticeably off from the actual paper.
I created the profile for the photos by shooting the i1 scan target, and I used -u because that seemed to make the most sense for what I'm doing. I then used cctiff to convert the photos back to ProPhoto RGB.
The actual watercolor paper actually works just fine in my printer, so I profiled it.
Now...I don't know what to do to get a good print of the art on the watercolor paper. I've done two experiments with gamut-mapped device link profiles. The first used perceptual intent and the second absolute colorimetric. The perceptual looks close, but the contrast is low, it's a bit undersaturated, and the printer still lays down a lot of ink on the unpainted parts of the page. Absolute colorimetric pretty much takes care of the contrast and saturation...but it lays down buckets of ink on the unpainted areas.
Spotread says that the paper is L = 97.5; a = -0.2; b = 3.1. Photoshop's color picker (of the ProPhoto RGB version) says that it's L = 94; a = 2; b = 3.
Um...help? I'm running out of paper to experiment with for test prints, so I'm hoping for some guidance of what to try next....
Cheers, b&
