[argyllcms] Re: Targen query


Why is it that the targets produced by targen perceptually look - at least on my printouts - as though they're made up mostly of quite saturated color patches, even though the algorithm is distributing the patches evenly in device space? i.e. there don't seem to be all that many 'greyish' subtle colors, either light or dark.

I don't have any researched explanation, but a hand waving one is that
for the color to be neutral or near neutral, the three device values
have to be fairly close to each other, and since the values are distributed
evenly, the chances of that happening is relatively small. It's far more
likely that there will be large differences in device value, hence subjectively
a large number of saturated colors.

If you were doing serious B&W printing as well as color I was thinking it might have been important to have all the greys and near greys well represented, since the eye seems to be quite good at picking slight colour casts in grey scales, but then the Epson printers for example have B&W printing modes anyway.

> I double checked the distribution of rgb values in the ti1 file and that
> was all in order.

An exercise I've tried a couple of times is to pull a test chart into
Photoshop, and then apply a gaussian blur with a really large radius.
Reassuringly, the result is grey.

I took the ti1 file and averaged each of the RGB columns and got 50%,50%,50%...but that didn't really tell me about the evenness of the distribution on each side of 50%, so your technique is better!


-- Milt


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