Color Profiling on Sublimation Film & Phone Case

[g1njeremy]

Has anyone ever tried to profile their printer, transfer media and media for phone case? If so, what is your set up, what is your profiler and how did you go about profiling your cases?

I'm currently using a SpyderPrint 4 to calibrate my printer and although the profile is CLOSE, it's still off with some color.

My setup

Printer: Epson 1390
Ink: Low Temperature DyeSub Ink
Transfer media: Sublimation film (white opaque one)

I tried profiling on iPad Air (the largest media to get the whole print target at one go) and although I think the result was not bad, it was a miss for some of the colors (a reddish shift for the beige color).

Any tips or hands-on experience would be much appreciated!


Thanks!

[ex0rcist]

Hi Jeremy,

I am running into the same problems as you! I run an Epson 1390 with Dyesub inks and Transfer Paper. My color on the transfer paper is pretty off. I know what they say about colors not being right until transfer, but it looks really off!

I was wondering how do professionals do it. Do they really calibrate on the material itself? (ipad in your case). I am doing phone cases only so how can I pull this off?

[carmona87]

You can indeed calibrate the hole workflow. Have a look into this ebook for a crash course in a color-managed workflow: http://spyder.datacolor.com/scripts/ebo ... _final.pdf

[g1njeremy]

Hi Jeremy,

I am running into the same problems as you! I run an Epson 1390 with Dyesub inks and Transfer Paper. My color on the transfer paper is pretty off. I know what they say about colors not being right until transfer, but it looks really off!

I was wondering how do professionals do it. Do they really calibrate on the material itself? (ipad in your case). I am doing phone cases only so how can I pull this off?

I would see the color on the final media first and then I'll see whether I will need color calibration or not. In my experience, using default Epson profile is pretty accurate already. It might be off in some color but it's generally accepted by majority of people..

If you're doing phone case only, it will be really tough since you just can't get the whole print target in one media. In both entry-level profilers, you're not at liberty to change the size of print target. For the SpyderPrint, there is a way to make the target smaller by playing on margin and paper size but due to the size of the spectrometer, you just can't have it smaller than A4 size. I've thought of potential solutions but it would require too many deviations from the workflow that you're risking a print profile that is not accurate at all...For instance, splitting the target by printing to pdf first.

Profiling on the transfer paper is worthless since you can probably tell that the color that you see on the transfer paper and final media are different.

You can indeed calibrate the hole workflow. Have a look into this ebook for a crash course in a color-managed workflow: http://spyder.datacolor.com/scripts/ebo ... _final.pdf

Thanks for the ebook! It's certainly more complete than other guides about SpyderPrint out there.

My question is whether there is a more accurate solution other than SpyderPrint or what to do if your generated profile is still off from the intended color. Do I have to manually tweak the curve, or birghtness/contrast, or CMYK?

Thanks!

[ArferMo]

ICC profiling.

Send a special test print or prints to the printer bypassing ANY colour management. Print and transfer to chosen substrate.

Then scan the printed item with the colour analyser and then the software compairs it to what it should have looked like and builds the ICC profile for that combination.

[pisquee]

the targets for Spyder are tiffs and saved in the program directory. you can change their size and print them the adobe color print utility, and then scan the resuls in the spyder software