Custom Printer Profiling with Pure Profiles
If you're having printer colour management issues with colour casts or inaccurate
colours, or you just can't get a good print on a new paper, then we can solve it
for you. Our aim is to provide you with a professional quality ICC printer profile
with our custom printer profiling service that will allow you to print accurate
colours every time, and at a price which is affordable to everyone - from the professional
photographer, to the home enthusiast.
Custom printer profiling means we profile the printer, paper, and ink
that you use, so the resultant profile will give you colour accuracy that is fully
optimised for your system.
By using the latest professional tools (X-rite's Eye One Pro and ProfileMaker Pro),
combined with our years of experience in profiling and computer imaging, we will
try to make your custom printer profiling experience an easy and enjoyable one.
Our comprehensive step-by-step guides will guide you through the process, and we
will always answer any questions that you might have.
Our Prices
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Standard Profile
£14.95
This is our standard profile (918 colour patches for the A4 size), suitable for
most inkjet, dye-sub and laser printers
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Enhanced Profile
£23.95
This enhanced profile requires more charts to be printed, but results in a small
but noticeable difference in colour accuracy compared to our standard profile.
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10% discount for 3 or more profiles
20% discount for 5 or more profiles
Plus a money back guarantee if you're not satisified with the results!
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What can an ICC printer profile do for me?
When you print a photo, the printer uses generic settings to choose how the colours
should appear. This may look good for certain papers, but there are major limitations.
Change to a different paper, and the colours will look different. Change to a different
type of ink, and the colours will look different again. Add in wear and tear to
the printer, and your colours can change again. Colour casts may appear, and details
within the print may become lost, resulting in lots of paper and ink used whilst
trying to get a good print. And that's all before you even try to get your prints
to match with the colours on your monitor. Does this sound familiar?
This is what printer profiles are designed to fix. A printer profile is a basically
a description of how your printer prints colours on a particular paper. With colour
management enabled, it's used within the conversion process of the image as it is
sent to the printer, so that the colours are printed as accurately as possible.
A good profile will mean that you only have to print the photo once - no Photoshop
adjustment of colours needed - just accurate colours every time. If you have your
monitor calibrated, you will also get the benefit of having a print that matches
what you see on screen, making colour editing a breeze.
In case you're wondering, ICC stands for International Color Consortium - they've
defined an ISO-approved colour management standard for how profiles define how imaging
devices work with colour, so that a profile will be compatible with all other profile
aware software.
Is my system compatible with custom printer profiling?
At Pure Profiles, we specialise in RGB ICC profiles. For almost all inkjet (Epson,
Canon, HP etc.), dye-sub and laser printers that have a Windows or Mac printer driver,
then this will be the printer profile that you need (we can provide CMYK profiles
for RIP users upon request).
A recent free utility from Adobe that is designed to print profiling charts has
meant that most customers can now print the profiling charts without the need for
software that is fully compatible with the profiling process - this now means Lightroom
and Aperture users can benefit from custom profiles without having to use Photoshop
to print their profiling charts. We keep a list of known issues with certain printers
and applications on our compatibility page in our how to order section.
What are the limitations of a printer profile?
A printer profile is designed to be highly accurate, but it is very specific to
what is being used with your printer. Your printer colour output changes if you
change the paper, type of ink, or some of the printer driver settings. A printer
profile has to be created based on one set of these, and the same settings, paper
and ink have to be used each time it is used. Changing any of these can result in
poor results (please note that the printer profile does not depend on the size of
the paper - a profile created on A4 paper can still be used on 6x4 paper).
What's the difference between a generic printer and a custom printer profile?
You can often get a generic printer profile for free from your paper manufacturer's
site - providing your printer is supported. These have usually been created based
on a sample group of printers, and can usually get you better colour than without
using a printer profile. However, the actual colour output of a printer varies from
one to the other, even if they are the same model. There will be a tolerance range
for the output of the printer in the manufacturing process to determine whether
the ouput is acceptable. Generally, the more consumer level printers will have a
much wider tolerance range compared to the professional level printers. Now if your
printer is at one end of that range, and the generic profile is more in the middle,
then your colours will not look that good. Factor in that the output of a printer
changes considerably over time due to wear and tear to the printhead, and even changes
in a printer driver update can affect the colour output, and you will see how a
generic printer profile will not give you the very best colours. This is where a
custom printer profiling helps - the resultant printer profile is designed to get
the optimum output from your printer, on the paper of your choice, based on the
colours your printer can output.
How long does a printer profile remain accurate?
Generally printer profiles remain accurate for a long time - for a lot of our home
users, we'd say the printer profile will give good results for as long as the printer
lasts. However the accuracy will drift over time due to wear and tear to the printhead.
If you use your printers regularly, then you might find you need to reprofile every
now and then - some of our professional photographers reprofile as often as every
six months, but a reprofile every one to two years would probably be beneficial
for most others.
How do I order a custom printer profile?
Please just place an order online with us - there's a very quick registration and
ordering process, and then you'll be able to keep track of your order by looking
at your account. You'll be given a unique code to write on your charts. You'll then
need to download a set of profiling charts and a printing guide from our downloads
page. Print the charts out following the step-by-step instructions in the guide,
mark them with the order number, and then send them to us - we'll identify the charts
by the code. We'll then get a printer profile emailed to you within 1-3 working
days. Full instructions on ordering a custom printer profile
can be found in our How To Order section.
Using the Density Charts to find the optimal media type setting
For more tutorial videos showing the profiling process broken down into the 5 steps, please go to our
Videos page.
Why should I choose Pure Profiles?
We've been supplying custom printer profiles since 2005, and have many satisified
customers - please take a look at our
testimonials page to see what our customers think - many of whom had never
tried profiles before, and were surprised by the results.
We only use the highest quality equipment and software (X-rite's Eye One Pro and
ProfileMaker Pro)- there is cheaper equipment out there, but the results of our
printer profiles speak for themselves.
We also understand how important customer support is when dealing with the often
confusing world of colour management - we don't just send the profile out to you
and then abandon you - we will do our utmost to solve any problems you have, and
that can be very important when choosing someone to create a printer profile for
you. Not all printer profiles work straight away for a variety of reasons (blocked
printer nozzles, wrong paper type selected, a mistake made in the settings), and
we'll work with you until we have a printer profile working well for you. We also
have had many comments praising our step-by-step guides - making sure the settings
are correct is one of the most important factors in getting a printer profile to
work, so we were determined to make sure that the guides are as easy to follow as
possible.
Money Back Guarantee
There's one last thing which we hope will help convince you to give profiling a
try with us ... a money back guarantee! If you are not satisifed with the results,
and we can't solve it for you within a reasonable time period, then we'll be happy
to give you your money back.