DSF

Use Little CMS for ICC on Linux - convert the image using little cms and the ICC profile then send the converted image to the printer, should work. Have used this for a different purpose in windows, its fine.
http://www.littlecms.com/

Thanks. I'll look at little cms and see what it is about.
I'm still trying to understand the whole ICC profile thing. I have my dye sub printer printing close to the same colours on polyester that my pigment printer prints on paper and canvas.
But it seems to be somethign to explore.

The more I look into ICC profiles and Dye Sub printing, the more interesting it gets. I looked at Little CMS and while I could make it work, the average Linux user is not what he/she was a few years ago. It is now as simple to use Linux as it is to use your mobile smartphone or tablet. They might not want to use something that takes a week to set up.

I have not bothered with profiles because most of my printing is of colour photographs. Therefore I am usually enhancing the picture anyway to get nicer skies, prettier trees, remove shadows etc.

It will be interesting to see if anything comes of profiles for Linux.

I've had an interesting time looking at info on ICC profiles, and it seems that they are cross platform. That suggests, taking Paul's and Alan's advice, and creating a profile for a given printer, ink and substrate, it should easily be possible to use Linux as long as Linux can make the printer use the profile.

So I had a closer look at GIMP, and found it is very, very simple to select a CMYK ICC profile. in fact my Linux distribution already had a lot of different ones installed. I set some crop tool presets for mugs, mouse pads and a few other things I print, rather than using my draw program for templates.

It is messy compared to using a drawing program, but I'm pretty sure I will find a simple way to overcome that. Now I will try to print a known image with a caste problem to see if I can get a different result from a few different profiles. If I do, it means it is a very simple matter to use LINUX for Dye Sub.

Thanks to those who have written with suggestions so far and offered help in actually creating a profile.

Ah, I thought we were discussing the issue because Linux was not capable of using ICCs at all. So it seems there was just a bit of confusion over what ICCs were and how they worked?

No. ICC will work under linux. the question is if there is any software that is icc aware.

Gimp, Inkscape, another vector program like Inkscape all work with ICC profiles, but I don;t know how. Also Xara LX Xtreme probably does.
The big thing for me is:

I have no problem getting marketable results from Linux and Dye Sub. You've seen the photos of my Linux output on heat transfer on cotton and dye sub on polyester shirts. BUT! I am using cheap substrates. Typically $4 for a shirt from the local supermarket. And if I really stuff something up on a $1.50 coffee mug or a $1.00 mouse pad I can print one with some changes.

What happens if I am printing a substrate that is $10 each? Now THAT is where I think an ICC profile is useful. A case in point. This week I had to print some mouse pads. The first one was a bit dark, the second one had a hint of purple in the clouds and the sea around my home island looked a little muddy green, which is how it actually looked when I took the photo. The third was almost perfect but I wanted it a little brighter.

I broke my rule of print first onto a piece polyester bed sheet because I wanted to see what it took to get a print by trial and error. So three prints wasted to get ten for sale. Cost including wasted substrates and ink and paper $20. Sale $70. Profit $50. Wasted $6, so profit was only $44. That is a huge piece out of profits.

If that had been expensive substrate it would be very costly to lose 3 or 4 of a product. 30 - 40% wastage.

What I am interested in is just how good the output would be with an ICC profile. Based on my experience printing other than dye sub, I would still waste some paper and ink getting a photo right, but maybe only one substrate. I will have to think about asking Paul to make one for me soon.

i tried gimp and inkscape under windows and none of them could work with icc. both of them supost to work but gimp gave crap results like there was no icc used!

also when you do you cost i can not see time you wasted doing this trial and error thingy. surely is more then you listed.

also when you do you cost i can not see time you wasted doing this trial and error thingy. surely is more then you listed.

Not really Paul.
You saw the results I am getting from genuine Brother Dye Ink heat transfers on cotton tees (before I changed it to pigment ink), and Dye sub to poly tees in the same model Brother on Dye Sub without ICC profiles.
Because I work with photographs, I am tweaking them anyway to get rid of dull skies or greenish blues that were how the places looked on the day, but are not what I want to print. A quick colour curve usually fixes that.

I've set a monitor ICC profile that gives me a reasonable idea what the standard printer will give me in GIMP. It might not work properly with printer profiles, but it does work with screen profiles. I keep all mine in /usr/share/color/ICC if I remember correctly. Needs root access to save them there though. And GIMP doesnt like them being moved. If you move them around you probably need to reinstall GIMP.

I know that the difference between my ordinary printer and my dye sub printer for similar output involves turning colour enhance on, setting vivid and diffusion, then adding about 15 to my blue setting and reducing red by about 10. Then it is just a matter of guessing the brightness. Usually That's enough if I want to mess with stuff. Takes less time to do it than to describe it.

Otherwise, I just have a preset in GIMP of Cyan -15 Magenta -20 Yellow -15 that makes most things look good. Then again a simple brightness change. I have a few different presets for ceramic mugs, polysub mugs, mouse pads and stubby coolers (same material but colour prints differently), Tee Shitrts and a few things I make myself that are not available on the market.

Steps are typically:
Open image in gimp
Click Colours > colour balance
Click the presets
Click Colours > Brightness/contrast
Adjust
Click export and give it a name

I did it while I was writing each step.
Took 2.5 minutes including typing here. So it is not an expensive exercise. The dollar values would change once I run out of my freebie ink. But from what I can see, 100ml of ink would do a lot more work than I thought.

I recently discovered that printing Dye Sub at Best quality setting was not as good an idea as I though. Media > Plain and Quality Plain Normal makes a beautiful print if the image is Hi Res, and Bumping the Media to basic photo paper was good for some substrates while leaving media at plain and bumping Quality to high or the lowest photo setting was great for poly mugs.

It is mostly if I have a problem skin tone that it is a challenge. Like one I had to do for a breast feeding group. I had to make a special preset for that because some of the members wanted their babies to look spot on, not to mention things like freckles and tans and nipples - and that might have been easier with a profile. But we got it in the end. It was a fun, funny and unusual job.

If I work out how to make GIMP etc work with a printer profile rather than just a screen one, I will get you to make me one. It seems your price is fair and your profiles are excellent.

I'm a bit of a non-conformist when it comes to things that cannot be done. Pisquee will have seen my posts on another forum about dye sub on 100% cotton tees. I know it can't be done economically or practically. But I am very happy to wear two of them every week sometimes several times in a week for the last several months. They are each washed a few times a week and usually in hot water and hot tumble dried.
At a party today I was asked by someone who prints DTG what printer I had because they had never been able to print anything with absolutely no hand and no way to tell it had been printed on. Like a Dye Sub Poly shirt - there is just no difference in the feel, and they don't seem to fade like my first 3 did.

So I believe you can Dye Sub successfully with Linux without being a Linux guru. What I am finding is that I have to sharpen my graphics skills and photo retouching skills. And I don't think I will ever achieve the quality you guys get until there is a way to get ICC profiles working in Linux.

What would be nice is the powerdriver under linux. Where we could have an ICC profile then a printer driver that let us pick different substrates.

Wondering if you could put the ICC into the printer driver - I know some of the older Epson wide formats could do this, and I've done it this way in the past, and could see no difference in putting the sublimation ICC into the printer driver, and have it manage the colours, or putting it into PhotoShop and have it manage the colours.