Curious if anyone knows if or where I can find ICC profiles for posters, etc. kind of like heavy gloss laser paper. Tried running a sheet of it through our 1204 using Oracal 3651G output settings, it looked more down the line of an oil painting...... Is it at all possible to print on this type of media (don't think it's eco-solvent friendly, but worth a try!) and can I find a profile?
Thanks in advance!
If you print on some media or another and the ink is wet, as in really wet, as it comes out of the printer then you probably don't want to be printing on the stuff. You should never have ink pooling, running off, or just not drying on any media suitable for whatever process you're running.
As far as a profile, contrary to the usually strident advice from the terminally anal, learn what your printer is going to do with this or that media and you'll find that you only need one or two profiles. I'll match print quality with anyone and all I ever use is two profiles. One for 3M180C and one for everything else. The everything else profile is for Oracal 3651 with a bit of minor massaging here and there to suit my prejudices. Things like changing the dither and gradient algorithms to a higher quality, heater settings, and stuff like that. Even with just those two profiles, half the time I use the Oracal for the 3M media anyway. The actual differences in output are micro.
Once you come to grips with your printer and its various idiosyncrasies, the major difference from media to media is the white point. There are other trivial differences but the white point is the big linguine.
Set your rendering intents to 'No Color Correction' for everything except bitmaps. Set bitmaps to 'Perceptual'. This is far and beyond the most straightforward settings and yields consistent results. Far more consistent that screwing around with this or that colormetric and most all of the other options.
Then print a Pantone chart on whatever media you'll be using with whatever profile gets you off. Always set up your print data according to that color chart and don't pay a whole hell of a lot of attention to how it might look on your monitor.
