Custom Printer Profiling
We create professional custom printer profiles so you can achieve the best possible output from your printer.
A custom printer profile is really a software recipe for getting the best, most accurate output from your specific printer on a specific paper. Using an excellent custom printer profile is one of the most effective things you can do to quickly improve the quality of your work. It will save you both time and money, and pay for itself within a few prints.
Professional Profiling Service
We use the same precise process to create your unique printer profile as we do when creating printer profiles for our own high quality fine art printing service. We pride ourselves on the proven colour consistency of our prints over the last 13 years, so you can trust that you are getting the best profile possible.
Competitive Pricing and In-house Speedy Service
We understand the importance of getting your custom printer profile created, so we process the targets as soon as they arrive in our office. All custom printer profiles are created in-house, and returned by email, which allows us to keep pricing affordable and get you printing accurately, quickly. It's so inexpensive, you can create a profile for all your favourite papers!
Award Winning Prints
Our printer profiles are used by some of the best photographers in the country and have produced award winning prints in highly regarded competitions such as the 2008 AIPP Photographer of the Year winner Mercury Megaloudis, Freemantle Art Centre Print Award 2014 winner Gosia Wlodarczak and many, many other Gold and Silver Print Award winners over the years.
How it Works
1) Create Your Profile Target
Download the profile target image and follow the easy step by step instructions.
2) Order Online
Place your order online with our user friendly ordering interface.
3) Get Your Profile Print To Us
Send your printer profile to us via mail, or drop in to see us at our North Melbourne office. Remember you must supply on a separate sheet your printer make and model and full paper details (brand, variant, weight).
4) When It Arrives/Processing Your Profile
Once we receive your target we will process it straight away and email through your custom printer profile ready for you to use. It will come with comprehensive instructions.
5) Install & Print!
Install your Custom Printer Profile by following these instructions and start making beautiful accurate prints.
Black & White Profiles
Whether you use the new Advanced Black and White mode with the Epson pigment ink printers, or something more exotic like Quadtone RIP, your black and white printing process can be profiled - and thus you can open up the world of soft-proofing your black and white prints.
Having an accurate soft proof allows you to better pre-visualise your results. You can see the difference between papers without actually printing, and can place tones in your image more precisely at the points you want between d-max (your darkest possible black) and d-min (the lightest grey you can print).
You can also see how the white point of a particular paper will affect your print - to decide, for example, if your image will be better printed on a warmer fine art stock, or a bright white semi-gloss stock.
Profile Instructions
FAQs
A custom printer profile is created specifically for your printer - it will provide the best results as it is a description of your printers behaviour with respect to colour on your particular media. Canned profiles do not account for the significant unit to unit variance inkjet printers exhibit so while they are often better than no profile, they're usually a long way off the best possible quality.
Read more on canned profiles and quality issues.
It is very important that you complete a nozzle check before printing your target. A clogged nozzle will create a subtle shift in colour which will make your printer profile inaccurate, as when the clog clears your printer will start to output different colour.
Printer Profiles are not platform specific so in general they can be used between different platforms such as Macs, PC, Linux etc.
However,
this is only true if the driver behaviour is consistent from platform
to platform. This is the case approximately 95% of the time - but
there are occasions where the driver behaves differently across
platforms. You will simply have to try printing with the profile to
check if this is the case, remembering to use the exact driver
settings that the profile was made for. If the other platform prints
differently, you will unfortunately have to re-profile.
Note:
You may come across profiles with a .icm or .icc extension. This makes
no difference and you can freely change the extension if you wish.
Yes - but make sure you change both the external and internal name as the internal name is used by Photoshop etc. and it is usually best to keep the internal and external names the same.
On a Mac: To do so simply open the Colorsync Utility. Navigate to the profile you would like to re-name, and click the button labelled 'open' next to it. In the list of fields, find the 'desc' tag. Edit this to whatever suits you and save the profile. This will change the internal name of the profile. You can also change the external filename in the Finder.
On a PC: There is a free Printer Profile Toolkit that can do this here. Install the application and open the Change Description program by going into the ICC Profile Toolkit folder.
Note: for ICCv4 profiles, you don't use the 'desc' tag - use the 'mluc' tag instead.
You will need to install your custom printer profile to your computer. Follow these step by step instructions.
It seems one of the main issues with the latest OSX updates is that it can no longer cope with long profile names.
Try renaming your profile - you need to use the ColorSync utility for this, you can't just change the filename and make sure you keep it less than 40 characters.
The users Library folder is hidden by default so you will need to unhide the folder so you can install your ICC profile.
To temporarily unhide the folder: Hold down the option key and use the Go menu to go to the folder.
To permanently unhide the folder: Open terminal and use this command : chflags nohidden ~/Library/