Comparing Profiles
Earlier in this lesson, you used the Mac OS X ColorSync Utility to check to make sure your color profiles were installed correctly. But you can also use it to compare different profiles. In this exercise, you'll compare a generic profile and a profile from the profile-creation exercise to see how they differ.
- Double-click on the ColorSync Utility, located in the Applications > Utilities folder of your hard drive, to launch it.
- Click the Profiles icon and select the profile for your printer from the list of installed ColorSync profiles. You can select
a generic profile for your printer that came with the printer, or one downloaded from the Internet.
Details about the profile and a 3D rendering of its color gamut are displayed on the right of the window.
- Click the triangle in the Lab Plot area and choose “Hold for comparison” from the pop-up menu.
- Now choose a different printer profile: a profile created for you by Chromix, one of the sample profiles included on this
book's CD, or one of the standards, such as U.S. Sheetfed Coated v2.
The ColorSync Utility overlays two profiles in the 3D preview area, as shown in the preceding figure, comparing the two printer profiles you selected. Your preview may look different from mine, depending on which profiles you selected to compare. I chose the generic SP Premium Glossy profile that came with my Epson Stylus Photo 2200 and an Epson profile I created called Stylus_900_122903_PGP_i1.icc.
The areas on the outside of the cube, in white, and the dark section crosscutting the cube are areas where the Chromix profile has more data than the generic Epson profile—data that contains more color.