Roberto Michelena wrote:
I wonder... one of the reasons profile builders need many patches, is that mostly no assumptions are made about the device being profiled. But a profiling app optimized to a particular kind of device, for example a profiler specifically for "newspaper web offset printing", should be able to take advantage of a predefined model (in other words, make a lot of assumptions) and get away with only 80 patches or so, while building fairly good profiles, wouldn't it be so? Hey, now that I remember, BestColor (now EFI) introduced something like that in their v5 application (as an option): for building the input (reference) profile, as long as it is an offset printing process, they only require 44 patches!! claim very good quality, never seen it so I can't say...
Right, and to some degree that is the approach mppprof takes.
For example: if you have an existing 'fairly well printed' newspaper profile, let's say one produced by IFRA or SNAP. And then you measure 80 patches or so of your own print run, basically primaries and secondaries (with their tints too), gray axis, black point, maybe some more of the gamut boundary. Then you should be able to build some kind of "link profile", sort of an edit to be applied to the existing IFRA newsprint profile, that would turn it into an acceptable representation of your newsprint... or am I totally nuts?
This type of thing starts to cross over into calibration. It certainly seem a viable idea, and has been implemented by various people. tweak/proftune incorporates an abstract profile based, profile tuning that could be turned to a very similar purpose, of fine tuning an original, more comprehensively determined profile.
Graeme Gill.
