Self-calibrate your photo printer
Published on April 15, 2015   |  Updated on October 31, 2019

Printer calibration : all steps

Basically, whether you have your profiles done or you do them yourself, the procedure is almost the same. As always when it comes to calibration, you must first calibrate your printer (calibration) and then record its characteristics (characterization).

Calibrating the printer

It will be a long time ago when you were satisfied with just one paper because you had succeeded with the generic profile in obtaining something correct. Whether it's for online calibration or with a basic printer calibration kit like the i1Studio (which works really well, as I've been able to check several times), you can go looking for the right paper/ink pair for you... Like no more and no less than at the "time" of the silver print in the darkroom!

Calibrating a printer therefore consists in printing a test chart after having chosen :

• The printer;
• the set of ink cartridges - when you have a choice -,
• the paper,
• the printing resolution,
• and the right set of printing parameters.

To use THIS ICC profile, it will always be necessary to use THIS combination. All speed, sharpness and other options, if used, should be carefully noted in the settings to be chosen to reuse THIS ICC profile.

Choice of the number of patches and paper

Little to say except that the i1 Studio, which does not have the reputation of being a "first price" kit, will only ask you to print 50 patches so be careful not to fall into the excess number of patches. In theory this improves the accuracy of the profile but in reality, with the latest i1 Photo Pro 2, 2,000 patches are quite sufficient (and are already huge!).

The printing of the test chart

The printing of the test chart is not done in any way. The reason is very simple : you must make sure that the calibration of your printer driver will not overlap with the one you performed yourself.

You must therefore disable all color management and be careful when choosing the options for your printer's printer driver. So two possible cases :

• You print the test charts from the Colormunki software and the printer's color management will be automatically bypassed,
  
• You have the charts as TIFF files, so the printing of the charts must be done from the Adobe Color Printing Utility software.

Depending on the software you are going to use, this procedure may be different, but here is the most classic one, the one with Photoshop with a size remark : since Photoshop CS5, you MUST use a small Adobe Color Printing Utility software to print the chart WITHOUT calibration (so I repeat it only if you have these TIFF files). Indeed, to work, the calibration of the printer needs to know how your printer behaves when faced with colors without ICC profile and therefore without color management. It is therefore necessary to print the calibration chart without any profile, which is now impossible with Photoshop since the CS5 version. Here's how to do it below....

It is time to create the profile of this printer/paper pair. Very simple because it is enough to choose the lighting illuminant (D50, etc...) and to save the ICC profile with a perfectly identifiable name (printer/paper and possibly illuminant if you did not use the one proposed by default.

I invite you to read my page dedicated to printing with Photoshop  

Which kits to calibrate your printer ?

To measure coloured patches you need a measuring device. A device that is capable of accurately measuring colors is called a spectrophotometer (or, slightly less "accurate", a spectrocolorimeter). Spectrophotometer solutions are available from $389 and spectrocolorimeter solutions from $349 and it is of course the preferred tool for professional printer calibration solutions. There are two spectros on the market in mid-2019 : The famous Colormunki Photo in the kit of the same name has just been replaced by the new i1Studio released in November 2017 whose only change is the software because the measurement tool is identical and the SpyderPrint and it is their association with different software that will allow to "create" an offer adapted to all audiences.

Calibration software

There are far fewer than for screen calibration. Datacolor offers a rather economical solution - from $349 - SpyderPrint 5.0 which competes with the new i1Studio from X-Rite, significantly more expensive but also more complete and more efficient, especially with saturated colors. Obviously, these solutions are very credible offers for amateurs or professionals who do not seek "scientific" or even surgical precision. If the X-Rite software, whether in their "amateur" or "professional" versions without aiming for absolute i1Studio accuracy and even more so in their professional museum version i1Profiler remain THE References, the SpyderPrint 5.0 suitcase (now in test on this site) is an undeniable success for novice amateurs. That said, Christophe Métairie or profilicc.com use X-Rite's high-end solutions to create your custom ICC printing profiles.

Attention! Some of these kits are also capable of calibrating a screen and would therefore duplicate a screen calibration colorimeter, although I remain convinced that a colorimeter is preferable to calibrate a screen because they are much more accurate at measuring their deep blacks. The deep blacks of a screen are darker than the blacks of an inkjet print.

Why can't we - and shouldn't we ! - calibrate a printer from a print run ?

For a very simple and important reason : the colorimetric defects of a printer, like any other color reproduction device, are never linear. What does that mean ? Quite simply that if you observe a slightly magenta dominant in your grays, this dominant will not be equal on ALL grayscales. You can very well observe a dominant magenta in the dark greys between levels 25 and 50 for example and rather green towards the very light greys. But then how can we correct these non-linear dominants? Well, with the color correction menu of your printer driver it is impossible because it only offers a precisely linear correction as shown in the figure below. If you move the magenta cursor to correct a green dominant, you will do so equally on all colors, all levels, of your photo.

Epson print driver for manual color correction when no ICC profile is used.

The only possible way would then be to edit a custom curve per color layer in Photoshop ! Laborious work if there is one and... automatically realized by a calibration kit and its spectrophotometer !!!!! Why bother then ?

There are now two ways to calibrate your printer...

Calibrating a printer with a dedicated kit is now within everyone's reach if they agree to pay the price : between 350 and 1,900 dollars. I personally use the new i1Studio kit at $439 a lot to calibrate my old Epson 7800 printer.

Note! The new i1Studio kit at $439 is based on the same spectrophotometer as the famous Colormunki Photo. So it's a "super" Colormunki Photo just a little more expensive.

Even without any particular know-how, you will obtain quality ICC profiles, much better than generic manufacturer profiles. That said, it must be recognized that generic profiles have also made great progress and that to print souvenir photos this will be clearly sufficient.

Now what if you are an amateur, professional photographer who values the quality of your prints ?

It can be said that in 2019, there are two approaches :

• Either create your own ICC profiles,
  
• or have them done remotely by a qualified service provider (paid or free of charge).

Here are the advantages / disadvantages of both methods...

1 - Make your own ICC printing profiles :

a) Advantages 

• The pleasure of doing it yourself;
• You can easily create as many ICC profiles as you want, so with as many papers as you want,
• Whenever you want, even on Sundays !;
• We have a better understanding of what we are doing and what is happening : excellent from a pedagogical point of view;

b) Disadvantages

• The price : minimum $350/600 and it can go up to $1,900 !
• Calibrating a printer is very simple but an expert can go even further with his own tools : this means that with the same calibration kit, a calibration expert who can create his own print patterns himself, will provide you with even better ICC profiles for your printer/paper pair, especially if you print in black and white, with your color inks.

2 - Have your ICC profiles printed remotely :

a) Advantages

• The price ! you have no calibration kit to buy and the price of ICC profiles is on average under 50 dollars (between 20 and 50 dollars). It is sometimes even offered by the brand of paper you use - Permajet papers -.
• For this price, you will also have a better profile - slightly - than if you had created it yourself; Why ? because some service providers create their own charts to improve, for example, black and white calibration.
• Print with the best profile available !

b) Disadvantages 

• You don't have the pleasure of doing it yoursel !
• You have to be patient and not want to calibrate your new paper on a Saturday night ! (Please allow three working days as the worst prints must be sent by post. This does not happen by SMS !)