Color Profiling at Work: One Touch to Better Pictures

Making great inkjet prints at home is often easier said than done. The options can be overwhelming, from the kind of paper you use, to the myriad of printer settings that adjust the speed of output, dots-per-inch printed, and many other functions. As new, faster printers become available, a change in any of these factors can affect the printed outcome and cause the picture to have bands or streaks where there should be solid color, or in some instances an overall bluish cast, for example.

Eastman Kodak Company scientists have made it as easy as a mouse-click to get the ideal combination of printer settings, ink, and paper for prints you make at home. They have calculated the impact of every possible variation in settings for more than 225 desktop printer models, then developed color profiles for every combination of printer and KODAK inkjet photo paper. Their work is the basis for the One Touch to Better Pictures feature in KODAK EASYSHARE software for WINDOWS OS (available free at http://www.Kodak.com/go/easysharesw/). One Touch to Better Pictures uses Kodak's proprietary color profiling technology to automatically select the right settings for your printer and paper from the family of KODAK inkjet photo papers. You get vibrant, true-to-life image quality without the time-consuming trial, error and waste of experimenting with printer settings at home.

Even with the printer manufacturer's paper, pictures still can come out flawed. Variables that affect print quality include how the inkjet nozzles are positioned; the speed at which ink is deposited on the paper and the amount that is released; the consistency of the ink itself; and the coating on the paper which controls how ink is absorbed. Ink applied too quickly or slowly can produce uneven color that makes the overall picture look too blue or too yellow, for example. Ink application and ink formulation also can lead to uneven coverage, creating streaks, bands or speckles in what should be a solid area of color. Printer papers also have a coating that binds the ink to the paper surface; if ink is applied incorrectly, it can produce uneven coverage as well (Fig. 1 below).

To devise the technology underlying the One Touch to Better Pictures feature, Kodak scientists developed the means to measure image quality that is produced by a printer, and displayed on a computer monitor calibrated to International Color Consortium standards. They calculate differences between the ideal color display, and the results of test prints made on your printer model at Kodak labs. These experiments determine mathematical formulas to convert the colors a printer makes by default, to match the colors in the original digital file. The formulas are used to write software that automatically makes necessary adjustments to each printer's driver settings so that the vibrant color, texture, and subtleties of brightness and shading recorded in image data actually appear in print. (See KODAK Tech Brief, Color Profiling for Better Inkjet Prints.)

When you enable the One Touch to Better Pictures feature, it adds support files to your EASYSHARE software. To print a picture, you select the paper: KODAK Ultima Picture Paper, KODAK Premium Picture Paper or - starting in October - KODAK Picture Paper, and KODAK Anytime Picture Paper. The software automatically resets your printer drivers so that each and every time you click "print," the hardware correctly applies the right mixture of inks to paper at the right speed and so forth, so that image quality is as close as possible to the original digital file (Fig. 2 above).

The One Touch to Better Pictures feature not only helps ensure that the performance of a specific printer model does not create flaws in the image, but also can even produce better images than those made with the manufacturer's brand of paper. Choosing the right paper for your digital prints is important, but getting great prints at home doesn't have to be an art or a science. The One Touch to Better Pictures feature is updated in conjunction with the availability of new printers and new KODAK inkjet photo papers. With this EASYSHARE feature, making great digital prints at home is not only as easy as the touch of a button, but is almost as fast.