While preparing to review Profiler 4.0, the latest release from MonacoSystems Inc., foremost in my mind was the concept of true color.

True color is the dream of the imaging professional. It’s a simple idea: What you see laying on the scanner table, is what you see on the screen, is what you see coming off the printer or press.

True color requires end-to-end purity, so that no tweaking has to be done repeatedly in the composition or editing application to obtain some semblance of the original when a print is finally made. With sophisticated and interconnected electronic components that are highly variable, this means that some form of compensation is needed. Sometimes this happens at multiple points in the device chain. The compensation provides an artificial form of “matching.” This means that a known analyzed defect is matched exactly by an electronic correction factor.

Since 1993, Monaco Systems has been creating software to help with this process. In the early days, they focused on color-correction solutions. Shortly after Monaco was formed, eight industry vendors came together to establish the International Color Consortium. The purpose of the ICC was to create, promote and encourage the standardization and evolution of an open, vendor-neutral, cross-platform color management system architecture and components.

MonacoProfiler 4.0 enables the user to build these ICC-compliant profiles for input devices (scanners and digital cameras), monitors (including liquid crystal display types), and output devices (printers and raster image processors).

Profiler comes in as the high-end solution in the Monaco product line, having been designed for graphic arts professionals who are typically operating at a level of critical, large-scale production.

To this end, it’s optimized for support of professional-grade measuring tools. For monitor measurement, this means tools like X-Rite’s DTP92 or a GretagMacbeth Eye-One. A typical example of a supported spectrophotometer would be the X-Rite DTP41 AutoScan, a sample of which Monaco was kind enough to send along for this review.

Since I had the spectrophotometer, this allowed the creation of a printer profile. The first step was to connect the DTP41 to the USB port on my Apple iMac running OS 9.1 and ColorSync 3.0.3. The tool comes with a serial port interface, but also ships with a serial to USB adapter and is suitable for either Macs or PCs. My iMac recognized the device immediately.

The next step was the installation of Profiler 4.0. This was again a smooth process that required the installation of a hardware dongle, which plugged neatly into the unused USB connection on my keyboard’s left-hand side. With a pricey software package such as this, the need for the hassle of a dongle is perhaps understandable.

One thing the price buys you is an excellent owner’s manual. Very well written and organized, it has many illustrations and is a compact size that lets it sit on your desk for easy reference while you work. It’s geared towards the person who has never done an ICC color profile, and yet contains great amounts of more advanced information the deeper one gets into the chapters. The software is geared that way, too. Often it presents defaults and pre-selects options for the user, but there’s always a more advanced choice that opens a plethora of menu options, allowing for extensive customization.

I wanted to generate a profile for an office-connected Tektronix Phaser 740, a four-year old CMYK printer that prints 16-40-lb. bond to 90-lb. card stock (60 to 163 g/m2), plain paper, glossy paper, and transparencies. I thought an older printer might prove to be a good challenge for the software, requiring greater correction, and it’s also one I had handy.

Profiler 4.0 walked me through the initial steps of selecting profile data for the printer, which requires you to know quite a bit about how your printer works, such as whether it’s using an RGB, CYMK or Pantone Hexachrome profile. PostScript devices use CMYK profiles. Most desktop printers use RGB profiles even though the actual colorants are CMYK.

The next step let me select the type of spectrophotometer I was using. Checking with Monaco’s Web site before purchase will ensure the purchase of a compatible model. Monaco also sells complete packages of its software and measurement tools. I chose not to select the linearization option, which means that you measure a set of color patches to determine the linear response of the printer throughout its operating range. Usually, the print driver performs this function, and it is not possible to perform if the device driver’s color space isn’t the same as the printing technology. For example, it’s not possible to linearize a CMYK printer that’s using an RGB driver.

Now, I was ready to print the actual test strips. You choose the paper size, resolution, color-correction, etc. Monaco suggests keeping a log of the resolution, media type and other settings used when outputting targets to create profiles. It’s important to understand that a profile is only applicable using a given set of circumstances and materials, such as paper type. Switching paper stock or resolution will typically require a new profile, as an important variable has been changed in the equation of correct color. No one ever said correct color was painless.

Printing of the strips can be done directly from Profiler, or you can save them as DCS or TIFF files and print them from another application. I printed them directly from the application, fitting two complete sets per page, which were then cut apart with a paper cutter.

The console display then tells the user which strips to feed into the measuring device, identifying them by sheet number and row number. At first, I was thrown for a loop because after the last screen, the application doesn’t really prompt you to start the measurement process, and the “next” box is grayed out. I finally figured out that the program was waiting for input, and when I hit the correct button on the X-rite and began feeding the sheets, then data began to populate the correct boxes.

The number of rows printed will vary, depending on what you selected in the previous screen. In my case, I had eight sets with five strips per set, meaning forty trips through the spectrophotometer. I also learned it’s critical to pay attention to this process; I was attempting to do this task while at the same time answering some emails. I ended up turning some of the strips around and feeding them into the device the wrong way, which necessitated starting the entire process over halfway through, so my attempt at saving time backfired. Giving the task proper attention, I finished it in about fifteen minutes.

From there, an actual color profile is generated and exported. A number of options are available immediately prior to exporting, such as black-level generation settings. Black-level generation selectively replaces the usual combination of CMY with pure black ink. This has the effect of creating more pleasing, contrasted blacks as well as saving use of the the color ink cartridges on desktop printers. The “table options” allow you to choose a default rendering intent, which creates a lookup table, describing how your profile compresses color to fit inside the printable gamut of the output device. In simple language, this allows Profiler to fit the range of color inside what your output device can handle. The resolution of this table describes the resultant interpolation in greater detail, and increasing it can generate smoother results but is more demanding on the printer or raster image processor in terms of memory and processor usage.

From this screen you can also access the “advanced settings” tab, which allows adjustment of a wide range of output characteristics for extremely fine-grained tuning of contrast and saturation. Monaco suggests first creating a profile without going deeply into these options, print some test images using your new profile, then rebuild the profile and apply the features only as necessary to enhance color. It’s entirely possible to rebuild the profile without taking all new patch readings, to save considerable time. For further control, you have an entire Editor option, giving you tools for adjusting output curves, editing CIELab color attributes, customizing gamut compression to affect color selectively, and fine tuning colors and neutrals in the color space of the given profile. Profile edits can be previewed, using either a visual image as a soft-proof (most useful, of course, after your monitor has been calibrated) or by reprinting and checking the image until the desired result is obtained.

Although I didn’t get into the more advanced editing operations, I found the basics extremely easy to use, and I generated my first profile and tweaked it quite successfully in one afternoon. Someone with more experience with color profiles would no doubt be able to beat my time by a wide margin, but the manual taught me a lot in the process.

For those wishing to do color profiling without some of the advanced features of Profiler, Monaco has a new product slotting in at more of a “prosumer” level. Monaco EZColor features a wizard-type interface, and does not sport the advanced editing features of Profiler.

Being scanner-based, no spectrophotometer is required. Ideal users for Ezcolor would be professional photographers and graphic artists. For a middle tier of pricing, Monaco has MonacoProof, which supports higher-quality profiles than EZColor, support for LCD devices, and support for the GretagMacbeth Eye-One spectrophotometer.