Product Review: Cathy’s Profiles
By Rod Barbee
Getting consistently good prints from any printer, be it your home inkjet printer, or a lab’s light-jet printer, requires that you use color management. The two critical components of color management are your monitor and your printer. If you have a calibrated monitor and good profiles for your printer (and you use them correctly), you should get consistently good prints.
You could spend a lot of time and paper (and money) making test prints, tweaking things, and pulling out your hair. Or you can calibrate your monitor and use a profile made for the paper, ink, and printer combination you’re using.
Most photo-quality inkjet printers come with profiles that usually work well with the printer manufacturer’s own paper and ink combinations. But there are many other papers out there to try. So how do you get good results from these papers? Unless there are profiles available, or the papers are made to work with existing profiles, the answer is to make or buy a custom profile.
You can buy affordable profiling software, but my experience with these products has been less than satisfactory, requiring some trial and error, testing, and tweaking. Even then, I wasn’t getting consistent results. More sophisticated and reliable profiling packages are available, but they are expensive.
Since I mainly use Epson papers (or papers designed for Epson printers) with my Epson 2200 printer, I didn’t want to spend the hundreds of dollars necessary to get professional quality profiling software and hardware for the few times I wanted to use other papers.
My next option was to have a profile professionally made, but these are expensive. Or so I thought.
Cathy’s Profiles (www.cathysprofiles.com) is a one-woman operation based in Norwalk, CA. For $40, Cathy Stratton will make you a profile that will knock your socks off. I recently had a chance to try out her service when I wanted to get a profile for some Office Depot premium glossy photo paper, which I use for promo and sample pieces.
Following the instructions on Cathy’s website, I downloaded the profiling targets and printed them to the Office Depot paper with my Epson 2200. A few days later, the profile arrived via email. All I can say is “Wow!” The color fidelity I’m now getting on the Office Depot paper using the profile Cathy made is every bit as good as the color I get using Epson paper and Epson profiles.
This is Cathy Stratton’s mission statement from her website:
“It is my goal to make the highest quality custom profiles affordable to anyone who wants the best possible color accuracy when printing their digital images.”
I’d say she accomplished her mission.
If you’re using paper for which you have no profile, or if you’re using a printer that didn’t come with profiles (the Epson 1280 comes to mind), you might want to try Cathy’s Profiles. At $40 you really can’t go wrong and if you’re as pleased as I was, you’ll consider it money well spent.