Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

As I use QImage (a great software package), questions arise that I can't find answers for. I was watching a video and it spoke about QImage printing as if 16bit (a reference to Canon XPS driver) although Windows only supports 8bit printing. So I was searching and saw a check box option in QImage which allows applying dithering to print output, profile output or both.
I printed my profiles through the Adobe utility with color correction turned off.
It seems I should have printed the profiles through QImage to make sure any color differences due to the 16bit enhancement is passed to the profile printouts before reading the color strips.
I have to assume there would be color differences in the profile charts based on the options which can be selected in QImage. Then another question arises, why turn it off for profiles but leave it on for prints since it seems the icc profile will have color differences and may not match for soft proofing.

If I need more profiles, I'd like to make sure they are done the most accurate method. Any ideas?

You should really try to print the profiling target from the same software you intend to use to print photos, so it's a good idea to use Qimage for that anyway.  In addition, it is very easy to turn color management "OFF" in Qimage without needing any special utilities.  I don't trust the Adobe printing utility anyway because: (a) why did they have to create a separate utility to print with color management turned off and (b) are you sure that little "side utility" even prints the same as Photoshop?  In Qimage, you can set everything up with printer profile "OFF", save that printer setup, and print your color target.  Then when it's time to use your profile, you can bring up that same saved printer setup and just select your newly created profile: this ensures you are printing with the exact same parameters as when you created the profile.

In reality there will be negligible difference in profiles created with and without Qimage's 16 bit dithering.  There are many patches being printed and the profiling tool does data smoothing between points anyway so the difference between what would essentially be a value of 100 (out of 255) versus say 99.6 shouldn't really be visible in print as the data smoothing will take care of that.  Leaving both options on in Qimage (the default) is best but images/profiles are provided as separate options for special cases such as if you were trying to match output to other less capable printing software.

Regards,
Mike

Haven't made a profile for a while, but isn't there an included job for that?

Yes: "{Q} printer target setup.job".

It is convenient in that it turns off sharpening and selects "Vector" interpolation for the smoothest output on top of turning printer profile "OFF".  In reality, as long as you choose "OFF" for the printer profile, your target/profile will work fine.

Mike

Thanks Mike -- the reply was very informative and has cleared up many questions.