Having Your Cake and Profiling It!

Over the years I’ve colour managed printing onto a wide range of different materials, including ceramics, cloth and leather, but recently I’ve been working on my first edible media.

A company approached us that produce cake printing systems for supermarkets. They manufacture a booth that customers can use to upload their photos from memory cards or mobile phones and the booth even has a scanner. Alternatively the customer can choose from a standard cake design. The customer can then add messages to the design and then it’s printed in the store bakery. The printer used is a customized inkjet printer that uses, of course, edible inks and prints onto thin sheets of icing that are then put on top of the cake. The colour results had been good but recent changes to food standards has forced them to change their ink recipes and this caused them some colour reproduction problems, hence their approach to us.

Since the system is based on a conventional inkjet it was actually relatively easy to profile. The main problem I had was the drying time of the ink on the icing. I had to leave the sheets for about an hour before measuring them with an i1 Pro - I wasn’t about to try putting sheets of icing through my X-Rite iSis. Initial results were encouraging but I had only used a small set of colour patches and there were some colour casts at various points along the grey gradation on my test image. I re-profiled using nearly 1000 colour patches and got a much better result. Normally there isn’t much benefit to profiling with a larger number of colour patches but when a device isn’t printing in a very linear or predictable manner then more patches can help.

All the testing had been done with Photoshop implementing the profiles, however the booth prints using the company’s own software and it couldn’t implement ICC profiles. We did try implementing the profile in the inkjet driver and Windows but neither result was anywhere close to Photoshop. I’ve never found applying profiles in Windows or printer drivers to be of any use. The company has gone back to their software developer and are updating their system to include the ability to apply ICC profiles. They are very pleased with the improvement to the prints and are back to the standard of print they had with the old ink set.

Datacolor SpyderCheckr

Looking suspicously like a slightly inflated version of the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport, the new Datacolor SpyderCheckr has just been launched at Photokina.

I haven't actually seen or used it, but it appears to have 24 colour patches (in a different layout to the X-Rite Passport / Macbeth chart) on one side, with greys, skin tones and other subtle colours on the other. The actual patches are reversible (the rear has larger grey patches) and replaceable. There is a tripod mount at either end of the hinge which enables easy positioning.

Datacolor say that the small red dot on the bottom left is a fade indicator, which will alert the owner that the patches need replacing in order to maintain colour consistency. Replacement patches are scheduled to ship during 2011.

As well as the physical product, the SpyderCheckr also comes with software that works with Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Lightroom to create presets which will actually perform the colour adjustments required to get your cameras back to 'perfection' as far as colour is concerned. Notice that this is not the same as a profile, which is valid only for certain lighting conditions, although I believe that the software can also create a profile for specific conditions.

The SpyderCheckr is also available as the SpyderCheckr Pro which ships with the SpyderCube for additional checks and tests. UK prices have not yet been announced, but from the £ and € versions, it's looking to be around £99 which prices it above the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport.

Will it sell? Well the price could be a problem for Datacolor. Although there are differences between it and the X-Rite Passport, most people will just see the SpyderCheckr as a large Passport. Datacolor's job is to ensure that they can differentiate it and communicate the specific advantages and benefits of the SpyderCheckr.

As soon it it's available, we'll be listing it on http://nativedigital.co.uk

Jan 2011 Update: now available. Find the Datacolor SpyderCheckr on Native Digital.
 

SpyderLensCal

The US/Swiss colour management giant, Datacolor have just started shipping their latest product, the SpyderLensCal. It's an interesting product, not just for what it does, but it shows that Datacolor are looking beyond colour management into other useful goodies for the photographer.

The SpyderLensCal is essentially a precision plastic target and graduated scale that measures the focus performance of your camera/lens combination. If your autofocus is slightly wrong, you can then make adjustments using the autofocus correction facility found on some modern DSLR cameras.