Hi. I really don't understand your reply to "tachyon".
Not surprising...you're obviously a professional, or an advanced amateur,
or very meticulous and dedicated to precise color management. Perhaps the
disconnect is in the difference between a casual user who occasionally
prints photos and somebody who is dedicated to optimum quality. For
purposwes of this thread, I guess I'm just a casual user.
I thought the original post sounded a lot like my own experience and
desired level of concern over color fidelity. I tried to answer from my own
experience at a level consistent with what I thought was needed. Perhaps I
shot too low.
Your answer was at the opposite end of the spectrum, so perhaps between us
we bracketed the problem reasonably well, not knowing the exact level of
expectations of the original poster.
Incidentally, professionally, I'm a digital imaging scientist. I choose to
not impose the same level of precision in my casual, personal digital
imaging activities at home as I do at work.
Irfan View does not Colour Manage, and does not make any use of ICC
Profiles.
There is no mention anywhere in its Print Dialogue of anything that even
remotely looks like CM.
Indeed I have found that any images processed in I.V. have their tagged
profiles removed.
Correct - I don't believe I said IV provides any color management. It is,
however, for my purposes, an adequate printing partner to The Gimp, whose
printing functions are pretty universally agreed to be inadequate.
Properly set up Colour Management and a Calibrated Monitor, will remove the
need for Test Prints, and will very largely provide
W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G.
Undoubtedly true, but probably overkill for the casual user for whom photo
printing represents a relatively small pecentage fo printer usage, and for
which those prints need not be at a professional level.
Test Prints are a very expensive route to getting correct
Colour Prints.
In comparison to the cost and effort needed to maintain a color management
system based on color calibration throughout, that certainly depends on the
volume of photo printing requiring precise color management. There are apps
that provide "test strip" - like arrays with two parameter variation that
might be more useful. I do understand that selecting color balance by
looking at a small printed image does not give the same visual result as
looking at the same full-size print. Nevertheless, for all but very
critical prints, it is adequate to my needs.
Personally, my experience so far is that - with a few exceptions - my
prints have met my expectations using mostly the default settings with
little or no image color balance tweaking.
I'd love to have a calibrated system that would guarantee my prints would
match what I see on the display, but I can't justify the cost and effort
needed to achieve the level of convenience and precision that I'd expect.
More power to you if you do it the right way and achieve the
correspondingly opimum prints. It's not for me, for my home system.
Optiker
