I know a lot of people have calibrated monitors and use whatever product for that. Until last night I had just opened a box and sat the monitor on my desk and used it then printed to my Pro-10. The problem I always had was that the Pro-10 would print skin tones as extremely red. It was as if everyone always had sunburn, no matter how anything ever looked on my monitor. I never sold or displayed anything that had this sunburn issue so I never really put too much thought into it.
Cue the i1 Studio;
I bought it before Christmas last year but never bothered to open the box as I hadn't needed to print anything. Did so last night and ran the monitor calibration. Really didn't look any different and things printed exactly the same with the sunburn look. Then I ran it as a printer profile for some Red River paper. Not only was it so simple to use, but it actually created a profile for the ultrapro gloss I was using and when I made my first print, the sunburn look was 100% completely gone. HOLY COW!!! The photos looked EXACTLY as I wanted them to and EXACTLY how they looked on the monitor. Didn't need to hold them up to a bright light or certain color light, they just looked great.
Creating a profile is as simple as grabbing a couple sheets of whatever paper you need to use, print one sheet, let it dry, and then run the scanner over the paper. You then print a second sheet, let it dry, then scan the paper and bam, you have a new ICC profile for that paper, custom made for your exact printer.
I still need to make profiles for some of my other papers, but so far I would highly recommend anyone who has one of these Canon Pro series printers to invest in a printer calibration product and I highly recommend the i1 Studio as it was so easy to use and produced excellent results.
