My recent experience with PP v7 and camera profiles.
When PP v6.5 was launched 2 years ago to become “the first profiling tool that could create profiles that correct hue shifts and saturation problems without affecting tonality (brightness and contrast) and at a similar time (I think) Qimage SE was upgraded to use camera profiles, I made some camera profiles for my 350D with Profile Prism. I made one for Capture One raw, SilkyPix (jpeg’s from raw) and Q-SE.
I’ve continued using that Q-SE profile with Qimage Ultimate with good success; I also noted that now all camera profiles are available for Q-U users, my profile gave similar results to the DDI version, which was encouraging for me.
Now that PP v7 is available with an improved colour management engine, I thought I’d re-visit making a camera profile for Q-U.
Rather than use the old target image, I took some new photographs of the IT8 target. Despite it being Winter here, there was (literally) a window of opportunity this week where the sky was clear for an hour around midday and I had a shaft of pure sunlight streaming through a window, just as the PP instructions recommend.
The new profile seems to be very good with a slightly larger gamut than the old one, presumably due to the new, more accurate PP “engine”.
What surprised me a little was the improvement in colour & tone accuracy of prints. I have pro-made custom profiles for the Ilford papers I use so print colour was always good with a few minor differences in the greens; I did have some difficulty with tone and always used a “Fill” Print Filter in Qimage to lighten shadow areas.
With the new camera profile and printing from raw images, colours are an even better match with the monitor and no Print Filter is required, tones match very well too.
Perhaps I should not have been surprised because there is a link between the image profile and the printer profile.
If anyone wants to follow my example and is not sure how to go about it, ask me here – there is a little “trick” to making an image from raw for PP to read but it’s very easy. The rest is in PP Help.
Terry
