Product Reviews

The latest in TypeMaker's Colour Confidence range of accessible colour management utilities, Print Profiler sets out to do for printers what the original Colour Confidence Studio did for displays. At last you can generate accurate ICC profiles for all your colour print devices, turning even cheap inkjets and colour lasers into trustworthy studio proofers within a colour-managed prepress workflow.

Despite the 1.2 version number, this is Print Profiler's first commercial release, and its significance in desktop colour management shouldn't be underestimated. Already there are plenty of options for calibrating and profiling Mac displays - free via ColorSync as well as commercial products - and practically all professional-class scanners come with IT8 calibration targets and their own profiling utilities. Until now, printing has been the broken link in the colour management chain, forcing you to rely on generic manufacturer-supplied ICC profiles, or invest in expensive and complex third-party solutions.

Print Profiler is affordable to small studios and freelance designers, and is easy to use. It takes you through a routine for printing out sheets of colour patches and reading them back in using a colorimeter or spectrophotometer. The software compares the ideal colour values to those actually produced by the printer, and uses the data to generate an ICC profile for your printer. Ideally, you would run the routine several times to create several profiles, typically one for each different paper stock you intend using, or for different print resolutions or ink manufacturers.

Go a bundle

The software is available on its own, but TypeMaker expects most buyers to purchase their copy bundled with an appropriate measuring instrument. We reviewed the entry-level bundle, which comes with a ColorSavvy CM2C ColorMouse. Another £1000 will buy you Print Profiler, accompanied by a SpectrocamUV spectrophotometer, while

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the royal - but not unreasonable - sum of £2995 buys you the X-Rite DTP 41 UV spectrophotometer bundle.

Print Profiler presents a friendly step-by-step interface with concise instructions. Having asked you to choose your printer type (CMYK for a PostScript proofer, RGB for a standard inkjet, and so on), the software lets you activate the measuring instrument and run its basic calibration self-check with the reflection reference card provided. You can then print off a sheet of 108 basic CMYK, RGB and greyscale colour patches for reading back in with the instrument, so preparing the profile with a linear scale of colours to base it on.

The ColorMouse works like a puck: you just point it over a patch and click a button to 'read' it. But if you think that doing this 108 times to linearise your printer is repetitive, wait until you reach the full target patch stage. Here you can choose to print off test sheets with anything from 300 to 1400 different colour patches, all of which must painstakingly be read back in one by one. Running Print Profiler on a typical sheet of 600 patches will take you an hour or two, so you'd better devote the best part of a day per output device if you opt for the whole 1400-patch hog.

For studios with multiple printers or regular recalibration requirements, we strongly recommend you invest in the more expensive X-Rite DTP 41 bundle, which reads entire strips of colour patches automatically with minimal user intervention. But if there's one fault with all the bundles on offer, it's that none of the hardware devices have been built with USB connectors. As a result, TypeMaker has been forced to include a KeySpan serial-to-USB adapter in every box, and our experience is that the adapter drivers can sometimes require a little encouragement before Print Profiler is able to identify and calibrate the device attached. On the other hand, all the software provided is natively compatible with Mac OS 9 and X 10.2 alike - no Classic shenanigans.

Any reservations are blown away by the results achieved once you start printing with the device profiles created by Print Profiler. Unless we'd seen it with our own eyes, we would never have believed you could get near-identical colour proofs from three cheap inkjets from different manufacturers and on different papers, all of which closely matched the Colour Confidence Studio Repro Pack on-press proof. If you're serious about professional colour management, buy Print Profiler now. Nothing else is as effective or affordable.