Alternate Color Spaces

In Curve2, there is an ability to load in additional color spaces other than the default ones (Gracol7, SWOP3 + SWOP5). What color spaces are people using/aiming for when they’re building their plating + proofing curves for uncoated sheetfed printing? Thanks in advance, Roger

Hi Roger,

have just found this forum today.

The obvious one would be an Uncoated profile.

At the moment cant remember the Fogra one but i think there may be one from Gracol soon.

I am doing an uncoated this week and will compare to see what it does.

Regards,

Dan

Hi Dan,
Welcome to forum. Glad to have you aboard!

Just a clarification: You can’t put an actual profile into the “Color Standards” folder - only a CGATS-formatted file. (Well, you can but clicking on it in the application won’t work.) The Userguide mentions putting characterization data sets in there, but you should be able to put any CGATS-style measurement file in there, and it will work.

Can you tell me where this folder is located or where I have to create it?

I’m not surprised to find someone asking. A reference to this is in a little tiny sentence on page 13, and another mention at the end of page 17 in the manual:
“More Reference color spaces can be added by creating a folder called Color Standards in the same location as the software and adding CGATS-formatted characterization data sets to the folder.”

Steve also mentions this in a YouTube video on Curve2. (I’ve just been learning how to link to a specific spot in a video. Let’s see if I can do this url right…)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nLdMdTj3wo&feature=PlayList&p=BED6DAC4A6F03DE3&index=0#t=04m58s

Ah! The only page of the 68 I skimmed
I have downloaded the CGATS SNAP TR002 convert it from csv to tab delimited txt file and it is in the list BUT it causes the program to lock up if I add very many sample readings.

Well, it can be a bit tricky to convert the comma delimited CGATs files to text delimited. And there is usually a lot of extraneous header information that might mess things up. You could try stripping out the unnecessary header information and just use something minimal like this:

"TARGET_TYPE ""ANSI IT8.7/3" NUMBER_OF_FIELDS 11 BEGIN_DATA_FORMAT SAMPLE_ID CMYK_C CMYK_M CMYK_Y CMYK_K XYZ_X XYZ_Y XYZ_Z LAB_L LAB_A LAB_B END_DATA_FORMAT NUMBER_OF_SETS 928 BEGIN_DATA 1 100 0 0 0 18.71 24.5 35.94 56.58 -23.4 -26.45 2 0 100 0 0 30.38 20.76 17.61 52.69 44.14 -1.09 3 0 0 100 0 47.52 50.81 11.9 76.57 -4.05 54.72 4 100 100 0 0 11.52 11.1 17.18 39.74 6.02 -22.44

Then again, you say it only locks up when you load in a lot of files. So if it’s working okay for a few, then it should work okay for more. How many files did you load in? I have given it about 13 without any problems. Maybe you had a bum sample reading in there?

Trying to do this same thing today, load CGATS21-2-CRPC3.txt file so it’s selectable as a “Target Color Space”, does this not work the same way in Curve 2.3 now? I copied it in a folder where the app is located named Color Settings just like the video, restarted Curve2, still doesn’t show up?
Any help appreciated. Never did any 4-color on uncoated until now and we have a large, special, rush project.

Thanks,
Terry

Hi Terry,

It should work fine. I’ve duplicated it here with no problems. A couple things to watch out for:

  • Make sure you name the folder exactly as shown, with a space between color and standards, and it’s standards with an “s”.
  • The files than can be used here are CGATS text files, like what you would get when you do a measurement. You can’t use ICC profiles in this folder; they won’t work (regardless of what my screenshot shows.)

Hope that helps!

that explains it, thanks Patrick, now it works. The video shows it as Color Settings, not Color Standards.

Good to go!

Nice catch! We have gone in and made some annotations in the video to correct that. Thanks for bringing this up. This can help others to not get confused!

For Curve3 users, the Curve3 manual describes this on page 24.