Profile utilities and evaluation images

[Serge Cashman]

Hi everybody. My first post here. Nice to see Andy Rodney presiding over the colormanagement forum. Anyway...

What tools do you use to help you evaluate your calibration, look at the details of a profile, compare two profiles and so forth?

Which images do you use to evaluate your monitor's image quality and how do you view them? What other tests do you run to determine that the image quality is acceptable and to compare image quality under several different profiles?

For instance to compare profiles and color spaces in 3D you can use iccview.de (as well as your OS gamut comparison tools). I've come across Bruce Fraser's Granger Rainbow but I don't know how to use it...
http://www.colorremedies.com/realworldcolor/downloads.html. There are test where you gradually go up the greyscale ramp to test neutrality...

Generally, how do you get meaningful information about the quality and the properties of a profile and of the resulting output quality (other than just profile validation and the resulting delta E).

Thanks in advance,
Serge

[Andrew Rodney]

I find ColorThink an invaluable tool for this kind of work.

In the end however, how do you like the output?

[Serge Cashman]

OK, I'll look at the demo.

Overall not that I don't like the output but I do see the artifacts (banding, color shifts on the greyscale ramp). Since I currently own several calibration solutions (out of curiosity, mostly) and have tried Coloreyes, I wanted to know how to compare results. And generally, how to intelligently talk about output quality.

Even if I used one application I would like to be able to see the image quality differences caused by different settings, like, for instance, the differences between Native gamma and 2.2 in Match 3.

It also had occured to me that there are two separate issues involved. The quality of the profile itself (that should be judged by the colormanaged output) and the impact that calibration had on the device output quality (that should be judged by non-colormanaged output).

[David White]

I'll second Andrew's recommendation for ColorThink. I'm using the 2.2 version and haven't tried the new higher end version yet. I've found it very useful for comparing gamuts of various papers. It's a great tool for a reasonable price.