Out of Gamut: Canned Profiles, Custom Profiles, and Pretend Profiles

Bruce Fraser

Color management lives and dies by the accuracy of the profiles you use. The generic profiles that scanner, printer, and monitor vendors supply vary quite a bit in their accuracy. Some devices display more unit-to-unit variation than others, and some inks and papers vary more from batch to batch than others.

In the case of printer profiles used by Photoshop, output accuracy depends on one set of tables in the profile, while accurate soft proofing depends on another separate set of tables in the profile. It’s fairly common for canned profiles to give accurate prints, but less accurate soft proofs. Well-made custom profiles are generally tuned to give both an accurate print and an accurate soft proof.

Windows users have another problem to contend with. A good many desktop printer vendors, notably (but not exclusively) Epson, bundle a single profile with each printer. The real, media-specific profiles are only accessible to the printer driver, which calls the correct profile based on the media settings in the driver. This approach works just fine for printing with ICM color management activated in the printer driver, but since Photoshop can’t access the real profiles, it can’t deliver an accurate soft-proof, nor can it make accurate color conversions outside of the printer driver. (Epson’s Macintosh installations include a profile that’s similar to, though subtly different from, the Windows version, that’s typically named something like “Epson Stylus Photo 1280 Standard.” Like its Windows counterparts, these types of profiles are useless in Photoshop, but the Mac packages usually include the real, media specific profiles too, and these work reasonably well in Photoshop.)

If you’re really serious about getting your monitor to show you what your prints will look like, custom profiles are highly desirable, if not absolutely essential. If you’re unwilling to take on the task of building profiles yourself, two reputable online sources for custom profiles are chromix.com and profilecity.com (I have no affiliation with either one, but I’ve talked to plenty of happy customers).

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