This page provides some guidelines for use of Profiler PLUS / RGB, and the sort of thing you need to look to achieve with the scan of your print swatches.

Get your Scan to Look Like your Print!

The first point we noted inadvertently, was that the file we sent ColorVision that we were trying to build a profile from was an absolutely awful scan! Yes, we just assumed we have a great scanner and we followed the instructions that ColorVision give, without really considering our scanner. oops!

So, please do check that what you see on-screen after your scan at least roughly reflects what the printed swatch-page looks like!

The following section gives you guidelines on actual values you should see inside Photoshop.

Things to Look For in your Scan

The following image shows a representation of the swatch page with some numbered, highlighted areas. These are discussed below:

1. Using the eye-dropper tool in Photoshop, your scan should show the ‘black’ square as around the ‘brightness’ values of mid-teens to mid-twenties. You can easily see the RGB values in the Information window, which will give you a good guide... or if you want to see the HSB value, click on the colour to select it, and call up the colour-editor to see the HSB values - which you are interested in the ‘B’ value. You might find it helpful to have your eye-dropper tool set to ‘5 by 5 Average’.

If your ‘B’ value is much higher than in the twenties, you have probably made the scan too light.

See (2) below for how we handled this in our scan.

2. Due to the way we perceive colour, the exact central patch may not look like a neutral grey... but it is! Move your eye-dropper over it in the actual calibration chart (as opened by Profiler Plus, the one you printed from), and it disappears from view, showing RGB values of 128,128,128!

In your scan, this square should have an HSB Brightness value in the region of 35-45% - if it is much higher, you can bring it down by decreasing the Gamma setting in the scanner software. Contrary to the instructions provided with Profiler Plus, we ended up with a gamma of 0.95 (nothing like the recommended 1.5!), and we could probably still have lowered the gamma setting to bring the value down. Adjusting the gamma down will also bring the black value down, so kill two birds with one stone on the gamma setting!

3. Apparently, many scans don’t produce enough separation between the bottom two rows of colours in the printed image. Ours was no exception, even though the print showed good separation. In our scan, it was so bad that the bottom four squares circled above (of which one is ‘Paper White’) showed no difference in the scan at all! So, it is easy to see how a bad profile will be produced, when you run Profiler RGB on a bad scan! ColorVision suggest resolving this by reducing the contrast in your scan; in our case, we achieved this by bringing the ‘White Point’ level down in the histogram view.

All the possible corrections noted above need to be carried out with continual reference to the results! Some scanning software will allow you to see the relevant values in a ‘scan preview’ mode that shows you the results of your changes to the various settings. As moving the white-point will effectively change the gamma of the scan, you need to watch for how all these adjustments interact. Also, be wary that your scanners preview may not show you what the end scan will look like with any great accuracy. We have found histogram functions in particular to be extremely unreliable with some of the scanning software that we have used!

Our first attempt at making these fixes resulted in a scan that we thought represented the print far more accurately. The profile that was then produced was our best to date for that printer / ink / paper combo, and whilst we felt there were still improvements that could have been made (either by improving the scan still further, or changing the slider values on profile creation, or perhaps by both) we certainly saw enough to see that this was a good approach to the scanning stage.

Some Warnings!

In the section above, we discussed the possible changes you could make to the way you scanned an image such that the resulting scan fitted within certain characteristic values. Here is where we tell you to be careful whilst doing it!!! Although the dividing line is fuzzy, you must remember that you are trying to make the scan as good as possible within certain constraints... you are not trying to fix any perceived deficiencies in the print by adjusting the scan.

Say your calibration chart print came out with a distinct colour cast (we’re not sure how you would see that, but we’re trying to build an analogy here!) such that you thought that everything came out a bit more red than it should have done. You absolutely must not try to balance this ‘redness’ out in the scan to make things more neutral! If you did, you would then give the Profiler software the impression that there was no ‘redness’ issue to correct, and thus your profile would probably print quite red too. If you left the ‘redness’ in the scan, then the software can see that, and correct for it in the profile! That’s the whole point!

And of course, the software is just software - it does things very analytically and using phrases like ‘giving it the impression’ is somewhat inaccurate, but there you go.

Some other Optional Scanning Modifications

Our understanding is that there are some other ways you can use to improve your scan for the software, even if you have to take control of these yourself.

For example, you may get a better scan if you set your scanner to scan in ‘high bit’ mode (typically, 12 or 14 bits per colour scans, saved in a sixteen-bit-per-colour file). However, the Profiler Plus software can only read 24 bit RGB files (8 bits for each colour), so you will need to convert the mode of the file back to 24-bit RGB prior to running the software.

Another example is the problems that can be caused by profiling textured papers. The texture can hide the ‘real’ average printed colour on the paper. One way to help ease this problem is to scan at 600dpi Instead of 300dpi. However, once again, the software expects a 300dpi file of certain dimensions, so you need to resample the file down to these smaller dimensions prior to running the software.

We hope this page has been useful to you!

Please note that MWORDS has closed. We aim to retain these support pages in the hope that they may benefit our past customers, but regret that we can no longer offer further comment or support in relation to the information above.