Calibrating printer with third party ink

Question

I use a canon pixma pro-1 on a 27 inch mac screen and print on Canon Glossy II paper. Prior to my problem, I print using the specified ICCs and the results were amazing.

However, due to the high cost of original canon ink, I have switched to a third party ink brand called Nanodigital. After switching the ink, the colours started to change so I decided to create a custom icc for the 3rd party ink. So I used a colormunki. Now the prints do match the calibrated monitor but I really don't like how the colormunki calibrated my monitor. For some reason, the reds seem to appear more yellow. I have tried changing my display profile back to the iMac display and printing from there but the prints still come off as if my monitor is calibrated.

In short, I want to be able to print what I see with my iMac's given display profile rather than the calibrated monitor. Is there a way I can tweak the calibrator or use a software to achieve this?

Let me know your thoughts, thanks!

Answer 1

You will have to calibrate your monitor and your printer! I do not know if the latter is possible with Colormunki, but e.g. i1Basic Pro2 can be used to measure colors on your reference color chart printouts, and it can create a profile for your printer and inks.

Then you will have a calibrated monitor + a calibrated printer, and so your color flow is complete.

Now, seeing tints on your monitor: this is a monitor calibration issue. You can calibrate your monitor to various viewing conditions, contrast, color temperature, backlight compensation, etc. Check in Colormunki's advanced settings whether that is possible (e.g. setting white point coordinates). You can end up with a monitor that is tuned to your viewing preferences, and still you will see the proper colors on your printouts. However, watch out, because your eyes may cheat you, and an absolute-value spectrophotometer may be a better judge of colors than your eye. :-)

Answer 2

The problem is that printers can't reproduce as wide a color gamut as LCD or CRT displays are capable of showing. Not only that, but monitors create color by adding all of them together to create white, while adding all printer colors together creates black. No color information at all on a monitor results in black (an sRGB value of 0, 0, 0). No ink on a piece of white paper results in white.

When you created the custom ICC profile what it did was reduce the color gamut of your monitor to that which the printer is capable of reproducing. Color shifts occur if you (or the application that creates the icc profile) chooses perceptual instead of relative colorimetric rendering.

When you have an out of gamut color in your image, the relative colorimetric rendering adjusts just that one out of gamut color so that it is in gamut by picking the closest color to it that is in gamut. The perceptual rendering adjusts all the colors in your image so that the relationship between all the colors remains the same. That means that if you use perceptual rendering the colors might all change unpredictably. If you use relative rendering, the only color that might change unpredictably will be the out of gamut color.