To follow this guide you will need the following:Ī printer with good repeatability and good colour consistency across the page. cht files for the common targets, and the targets themselves are supplied with suitable reference files – but obtaining these files for a custom target is a little bit trickier. To generate an ICC profile for a camera or scanner using ArgyllCMS you need:Ī reference file, describing the physical colour of each patch on the calibration chart.Īrgyll comes with. If you want to try creating a custom profile despite these potential issues, read on! While there are good reasons why you might want to use a custom target there are also good reasons not to - namely that the target's gamut is of course limited by that of your printer (and likely to be somewhat smaller than professionally-produced targets), and also a home-produced target is likely to exhibit more problems with metamerism (where colours that match under one set of viewing conditions fail to do so under another). Or perhaps you want to use a target with a brighter white than the off-the-shelf targets offer in order to avoid clipping of paper texture when scanning in a piece of artwork (see also Argyll's -u and -U switches for colprof if this is an issue for you) – or maybe you want to create a profile that uses a custom illuminant, or perhaps you want to eliminate inter-instrument disagreement as a source of inaccuracy when printing scanned images.

You might, for instance, be unable to eliminate reflections at a particular position so want to use a matte rather than gloss target. It’s perfectly possible to do this, and there are several reasons why you might want to. There are other options too, such as the ColorChecker DC or SG charts, but what if you want to create your own chart? The most widely-recognised of these is probably the IT8.7/2 chart, with its spread of greys, synthetic colours and real-world shades. When generating a colour profile for a scanner or camera there are several standard targets that are traditionally used.

It8 target chart