Paul, you are welcome to any help I can give. While we have been on this thread I just tried a print on a piece of mouse pad. Beautiful, vibrant and glossy and i set the colours like a tourist post card. Just a hint of gamma.
The whole thing with Linux is to use the steps I posted in that other thread. It works for photographs. I made the point in the other thread that it may not be as simple to match Pantone colour set. Having said that, I just matched my club logo as closely as I think is practical in maybe 5 minutes. It would have probably been easier and faster in Windows, but I only use Linux.
I'll put together a page with pics of the 'original photograph', the print in pigment, and my Dye Sub result on a mug and on polyester cloth. I already posted the settings. That will give Linux users a quick start.
If you have a machine with Ubuntu, and if it will print at all, I think you can get similar results to mine in perhaps 5 tries using the steps above. Adjust CMY in GIMP and change Brightness, Contrast and Gamma if necessary in Libre Office Draw. (Used to be OpenOffice).
I found the CMY settings that gave me a nice result and saved them as a preset in GIMP Color Balance. so it is a 3 click operation.
If you want to do any of this off forum, you have my contact details. I searched and searched the net and everyone seems to think it is hard or impossible, so they are doing the Windows Waltz. But again, I'm not trying to convert people away from things that work and are proven to give results. Just trying to let Linux users who are interested in Dye Sub and who don't want to spend a lot of extra money, know it is possible and the only expensive part is the ink.
Cheers, and thanks,
RossD.
Linux and Dye Sub - is it difficult?
Re: Linux and Dye Sub - is it difficult?
This could be good set up for people with bit older machines kicking around. so it could be interesting project...
http://www.howtoprintstuff.co.uk <-- How To Print Stuff BLOG
Re: Linux and Dye Sub - is it difficult?
Now that I understand the importance of Gamma - the last missing piece, I will make up a little web site for any regular Linux users on this site to see how to use Linux in Dye Sub. If they already use Windows for their dye sub, they can at least check it out without loading profiles and stuff. They or you, will have the advantage of being able to compare outputs directly. Something I can't do.
Reading the forum posts helped me in my early expeeriments, but I could find nothing, anywhere about how to use Linux and work with Dye Sub.
My formula now is very simple, quickly tweaking in one of two sequences, depending if the program works with CMY or RGB.
Cyan Magenta Yellow then Brightness Contrast Gamma or Red Green Blue then Brightness Contrast Gamma.
Some jobs need nothing more than the first, which I mentioned previously, I have preset.
Brightness and Contrast should always be changed together, usually with contrast changing by about 50% of what you changed in brightness.
Gamma might not be needed at all, but sometimes I have a logo that I want to be a particular blue or red.
I do all my test prints on 100% polyester bed sheets, then fine tune on the substrate if I must. Then save that document in its own folder. For example. Shirts, Ceramic Mugs, Poly Mugs, Mouse Pads are all saved in separate folders as I get one that looks good. usually takes 3 presses on cut up bed sheet, then one or two on the substrate, to get right.
Sometimes it is not that simple if I have a muddy image to start with, but from what I have read, even people with an ICC profile sometimes need to tweak for different substrates.
I also print on canvas and had to learn to tweak images to get the 'postcard' scenery with bluest skies and greenest trees etc, so I suppose it is exactly the same for Dye Sub - just slightly different settings.
Reading the forum posts helped me in my early expeeriments, but I could find nothing, anywhere about how to use Linux and work with Dye Sub.
My formula now is very simple, quickly tweaking in one of two sequences, depending if the program works with CMY or RGB.
Cyan Magenta Yellow then Brightness Contrast Gamma or Red Green Blue then Brightness Contrast Gamma.
Some jobs need nothing more than the first, which I mentioned previously, I have preset.
Brightness and Contrast should always be changed together, usually with contrast changing by about 50% of what you changed in brightness.
Gamma might not be needed at all, but sometimes I have a logo that I want to be a particular blue or red.
I do all my test prints on 100% polyester bed sheets, then fine tune on the substrate if I must. Then save that document in its own folder. For example. Shirts, Ceramic Mugs, Poly Mugs, Mouse Pads are all saved in separate folders as I get one that looks good. usually takes 3 presses on cut up bed sheet, then one or two on the substrate, to get right.
Sometimes it is not that simple if I have a muddy image to start with, but from what I have read, even people with an ICC profile sometimes need to tweak for different substrates.
I also print on canvas and had to learn to tweak images to get the 'postcard' scenery with bluest skies and greenest trees etc, so I suppose it is exactly the same for Dye Sub - just slightly different settings.
Re: Linux and Dye Sub - is it difficult?
As the substrate affects the colour of the print to a very large degree, different substrates need different ICCs in a ideal set up. Most people however don't do this, and have one generic profile to cover their printer/inks which is made for a fairly pure bright white substrate, usually an aluminium sheet. However, the resulting print onto aluminium will look very different if the same ink was sublimated into a slightly off white/cream polyester fabric.rossdv8;70333 wrote:Sometimes it is not that simple if I have a muddy image to start with, but from what I have read, even people with an ICC profile sometimes need to tweak for different substrates.
The ICC profile can be seen as colour correction, taking into account what colours your inks are capable of when used in your printer, laid down and carried on your sublimation printer and eventually sublimated into a substrate. In creating an ICC, over 1000 colour swatches are printed and then scanned with a special colour meter, and then the computer performs a load of complex maths to create the profile. It does what you are trying to achieve by dragging the colour/brightness/contract/gamma sliders around, to a much higher degree of accuracy.
If the printer is changed, or the inks are a different brand, or a different substrate is used than a new ICC is needed, so you can't have a one size fits all list of colour, gamma, brightness and contrast settings for anyone using linux, unless all the users agree on using the same sublimation ink brand, and the same printer model, even then there will be variances between the individual printers.
I do admire the amount of effort and patience that you are putting into this, but it does feel like you are trying to reinvent the wheel, and that your time may be better spent actually designing, printing and selling your work, rather than manually trying to tweak colour settings.
Re: Linux and Dye Sub - is it difficult?
I agree with pisquee on that last post.
But unless I can print, I can't design, print and sell my work. Nor can other Linux users. It will be nice when someone makes ICC profiles for LINUX easily available for various combinations of printers. inks and substrates and indeed there is a project underway to do just that, but it may take years to get here.
In the mean time, we Linux users are left in the dark, so we're stuck with playing 'Blind Man's Buff', and I will try to lift the blindfold a little, becase there is so little information available to us. There is something very important that I forgot about.
I noticed early was that the printed output from dye sub ink on polyester and the output from an identical printer using genuine ink on paper showed 'some' completely different colours, while others appeared great. So I printed a simple colour test. The one with 3 overlapping circles of CYM that give you RGB and Black appears magically in the middle.
Magenta and Yellow were very close but the Cyan was a weird shade and no amount of tweaking seemed to make it the same as the pigment print. The black looked like dark brown mud. Then I found this gem.
"
Firstly you need to create a grey image. Use this Grey Test or create an RGB image in Photoshop. Select R 127, G 127, B 127 with the Color Picker and paint the image. This will create a perfect mid-grey image. If it doesn't look grey on screen, the monitor can be adjusted with Gamma in Control Panel although this won't affect the print.
Print the Grey Test image in one corner of your paper.
You now have to decide what colour it is! The writer suggests using a photographic grey card for comparison. It is essential that the comparison is made in daylight by a person with good colour vision. If the print is the same colour as the grey card then fine - being lighter or darker doesn't matter. It is far more likely though that the print will have a colour cast.
"
Check here for more. http://www.colourcasts.20m.com/ It is written for photographic printing and Windows, but the method with the grey works fine in Linux.
I had to do only one thing to almost make my printers match. I set my dye sub printer Colour Correction to add some Blue at print time. The change was immediate and amazing, but the red had a hint of orange. Another small change fixed that.
Because almost all my work is reproducing photographic images, tweaking pictures is not always because of the printer. Sometimes if is because the day was dull or the grass isn't a pretty enough green, or I want a bluer sky. And not being a photographer means I have more to learn. It helps though that when I print my images on canvas, if the customer wants a shirt or mug or mouse pad, the dye sub version will be close to the same.
If you look at the Dye Sub sunrise shirt and the sunrise short printed with heat transfer and manufacturer's dye ink, you'll see how bad the colour difference was before i discovered that I could set both printers to matching output.
But that one simple thing. Easily making the print colours from my Dye Sub and Pigment printers almost identical, has saved a lot of bother.
Sadly, it feels that way here toobut it does feel like you are trying to reinvent the wheel, and that your time may be better spent actually designing, printing and selling your work, rather than manually trying to tweak colour settings.
But unless I can print, I can't design, print and sell my work. Nor can other Linux users. It will be nice when someone makes ICC profiles for LINUX easily available for various combinations of printers. inks and substrates and indeed there is a project underway to do just that, but it may take years to get here.In the mean time, we Linux users are left in the dark, so we're stuck with playing 'Blind Man's Buff', and I will try to lift the blindfold a little, becase there is so little information available to us. There is something very important that I forgot about.
I noticed early was that the printed output from dye sub ink on polyester and the output from an identical printer using genuine ink on paper showed 'some' completely different colours, while others appeared great. So I printed a simple colour test. The one with 3 overlapping circles of CYM that give you RGB and Black appears magically in the middle.
Magenta and Yellow were very close but the Cyan was a weird shade and no amount of tweaking seemed to make it the same as the pigment print. The black looked like dark brown mud. Then I found this gem.
"
Firstly you need to create a grey image. Use this Grey Test or create an RGB image in Photoshop. Select R 127, G 127, B 127 with the Color Picker and paint the image. This will create a perfect mid-grey image. If it doesn't look grey on screen, the monitor can be adjusted with Gamma in Control Panel although this won't affect the print.
Print the Grey Test image in one corner of your paper.
You now have to decide what colour it is! The writer suggests using a photographic grey card for comparison. It is essential that the comparison is made in daylight by a person with good colour vision. If the print is the same colour as the grey card then fine - being lighter or darker doesn't matter. It is far more likely though that the print will have a colour cast.
"
Check here for more. http://www.colourcasts.20m.com/ It is written for photographic printing and Windows, but the method with the grey works fine in Linux.
I had to do only one thing to almost make my printers match. I set my dye sub printer Colour Correction to add some Blue at print time. The change was immediate and amazing, but the red had a hint of orange. Another small change fixed that.
Because almost all my work is reproducing photographic images, tweaking pictures is not always because of the printer. Sometimes if is because the day was dull or the grass isn't a pretty enough green, or I want a bluer sky. And not being a photographer means I have more to learn. It helps though that when I print my images on canvas, if the customer wants a shirt or mug or mouse pad, the dye sub version will be close to the same.
If you look at the Dye Sub sunrise shirt and the sunrise short printed with heat transfer and manufacturer's dye ink, you'll see how bad the colour difference was before i discovered that I could set both printers to matching output.
But that one simple thing. Easily making the print colours from my Dye Sub and Pigment printers almost identical, has saved a lot of bother.
Re: Linux and Dye Sub - is it difficult?
I may be wrong but icc should work under linux without a problem. All you need to do is software thac can use it. Gimp, cinepaint, scribus etc... So once you have icc for your ink/printer then i can not see any problem.
http://www.howtoprintstuff.co.uk <-- How To Print Stuff BLOG
Re: Linux and Dye Sub - is it difficult?
You are not wrong Paul.
There is a current ICC project, though not aimed at Dye Sub. So printer ICC profiles if available can be used in Linux under what we call Gutenprint drivers. In fact a generic Adobe ICC is often used to calibrate monitors. I have one screen calibrated with an Adobe ICC to almost match my pigment printer output. Now that I can make the Dye Sub printer output almost exactly match the Pigment printer output it makes it relatively easy to print Dye Sub.
The plain fact is, there are many more Windows and Mac users in the world, because they are 'marketed' operating systems.
However The trouble for Linux users is the availability of ICC profiles that you use. We are left out in the cold. So we must either find a Linux person who is willing to create ICC profiles, experiment ourselves with printer driver output and software workspace or find results of others' experiments. My own searching showed people had tried and given up. I don't know anyone other than myself getting results even close to those in the link earlier in this post.
My posts here are an attempt to correct that and provide a starting point for further refinement. More importantly, I would like to show that acceptable results can be attained easily.
If I could use Windows or Mac for work, it would be easy. But I cannot. Like many Linux users I do not have, nor do I want, a Windows or Mac system. But I did want to decorate objects, and I enjoyed finding out I can make marketable products.
My criteria is that a shirt printed on cotton with heat transfer and a shirt printed on polyester with dye sub, should look the same, except for the added vibrancy in the polyester. I may not be quite there, but it is merchantable and simple. That's what counts.
There is a current ICC project, though not aimed at Dye Sub. So printer ICC profiles if available can be used in Linux under what we call Gutenprint drivers. In fact a generic Adobe ICC is often used to calibrate monitors. I have one screen calibrated with an Adobe ICC to almost match my pigment printer output. Now that I can make the Dye Sub printer output almost exactly match the Pigment printer output it makes it relatively easy to print Dye Sub.
The plain fact is, there are many more Windows and Mac users in the world, because they are 'marketed' operating systems.
However The trouble for Linux users is the availability of ICC profiles that you use. We are left out in the cold. So we must either find a Linux person who is willing to create ICC profiles, experiment ourselves with printer driver output and software workspace or find results of others' experiments. My own searching showed people had tried and given up. I don't know anyone other than myself getting results even close to those in the link earlier in this post.
My posts here are an attempt to correct that and provide a starting point for further refinement. More importantly, I would like to show that acceptable results can be attained easily.
If I could use Windows or Mac for work, it would be easy. But I cannot. Like many Linux users I do not have, nor do I want, a Windows or Mac system. But I did want to decorate objects, and I enjoyed finding out I can make marketable products.
My criteria is that a shirt printed on cotton with heat transfer and a shirt printed on polyester with dye sub, should look the same, except for the added vibrancy in the polyester. I may not be quite there, but it is merchantable and simple. That's what counts.
Re: Linux and Dye Sub - is it difficult?
Iam not sure i got you right... You said if there is a person who is doing icc for linux??? Surealy this can be done under mac/win and just used under linux? I can provide you with icc's but can not test them as i dont have linux. So if you willing to have a go then we can colaborate and help those peuinguin lovers 
http://www.howtoprintstuff.co.uk <-- How To Print Stuff BLOG
Re: Linux and Dye Sub - is it difficult?
Paul, that could be an interesting project. Might be a little tricky getting the print samples to you, but if you feel like letting me know your usual charge to create a profile I'll work out the logistics and whether the cost is practical.
As I mentioned, I already used an ICC profile to calibrate one of my monitors. I use Adobe 1998.icc to print from GIMP, which you are probably familiar with. But at present there's no way to use ICC profiles with the other software, and GIMP is not a printing program.
This is why I tweak the Dye sub printer to match the Pigment printer output.
It would be nice to be able to point people at someone who can produce an ICC profile, so hey can just 'use it'.
As I mentioned, I already used an ICC profile to calibrate one of my monitors. I use Adobe 1998.icc to print from GIMP, which you are probably familiar with. But at present there's no way to use ICC profiles with the other software, and GIMP is not a printing program.
This is why I tweak the Dye sub printer to match the Pigment printer output.
It would be nice to be able to point people at someone who can produce an ICC profile, so hey can just 'use it'.
Re: Linux and Dye Sub - is it difficult?
Well... As far as i k ow you can not print with adobe 1998 as this is colour working space.
anoer thing is even if we do icc you will be the only person who can use it as this will be custom made for your setup only. It can work for someone with exactly same set up thou....
anoer thing is even if we do icc you will be the only person who can use it as this will be custom made for your setup only. It can work for someone with exactly same set up thou....
http://www.howtoprintstuff.co.uk <-- How To Print Stuff BLOG
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