Do I Need Sublimation Printer Profiles?

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You are about to learn everything you need to know about sublimation color profiles, ICC profiles, power drivers, ink profiles, printer profiles or anything else you want to call them!

Without a Printer Profile

• look at the greens!

With a Printer Profile

• Disclaimer- these are photos just taken on my iphone with natural light. While with the profile doesn’t seem exact in the pictures, in person they are very close. Also with the profile, all the colors range correctly where without the profile the left colors look good but the greens are almost all the same color. Also, the print contained neon colors which are out of the gamut of a CMYK printer meaning that it will never be able to print them.

 

Understanding Printers

Computer screens display color in RGB (Red, Green, Blue) color format. Therefore, most software that we design in uses a RGB color format but printers print in CMYK(Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) color format. The color profile is in charge of converting all of the RGB colors to CMYK.

Desktop printers come with print drivers that are designed to work with the specific Epson ink that comes with the printer to convert RGB to CMYK. When we use third-party inks, they are slightly different, which changes how things print dramatically. So the color profile is software that tells your printer how to correctly print the colors on the screen(RGB)f to CMYK for the ink being used in the printer.

As you can imagine, 4 colors can’t produce every color. The limit of the printer is called the gamut. For more information on the gamut of printers and how it affects sublimation, check out this article.  The most popular colors that printers are unable to print are neon or bright turquoise colors.

For those colors that the printer is unable to print, the color profile(with the correct settings) helps adjust the surrounding colors so that the one color doesn’t stick as incorrect! Once the profile converts the colors to CMYK it then determines the order in which it needs print/to lay down the ink to create the most realistic image.

Profiles allow us to print the same image from Word, Silhouette Studio and Photoshop, and they would all print the same because the printer profile would take the image and convert it to CMYK consistently every time.

Sublimation Printer Profiles

Now that we understand a little about what sublimation profiles do, let’s talk about your options! These are based on the type of printer that you are using. Check out this article for a comparison of Sublimation Printers!

Sawgrass Virtuso Printers

When you purchase a Sawgrass Virtuso Printer, they will give you a power driver that essentially bundles up all of the profiles for the Sawgrass printer into a nice, convenient package. This similar to when you buy a regular desktop printer all you do is install the software/driver and press print form whatever software you are using.

Sawgrass will even remote into your computer and set up the driver for you. Once installed, instead of choosing your printer when you print, you choose the power driver. The beauty of the power driver is that every time you press print from a RGB based software (practically all of them) the Sawgrass Virtuso printer, will print the image with the correct colors. It is that easy! – or so they say, I don’t have a Sawgrass printer!

Desktop Epson Sublimation Printers

Epson has two categories of printers for sublimation. The desktop office printers that are moderately priced and high-end wide format printers that are made for fine art. The wide format printers handle profile much different but I will focus on desktop printers as those the most commonly used by sublimation beginners.

The Epson WorkForce

Update: With the new Epson Print Drivers you can now control color profiles from your normal print screen.

The Workforce printers are designed to be moderately priced office printers and not intended to print high-quality photos, which often requires printer color profiles.  As a result, Epson doesn’t allow you to control colors on the printer itself. So if you want to print using printer profiles for your third-party(sublimation) ink, you will need to turn off the printer’s color management and control color from your software. This means that in order for you to use the color profile from your ink supplier, you would have to only print from high-end software like Photoshop, Illustrator and Corel.

This is the largest drawback to converting an Epson Desktop Printer but if you are serious and want to have the best graphics, a design software like this is worth the investment. Another option that is available is to choose an ink that doesn’t require printer profiles.

Side Note: Within the last year, Cobra Ink, a leader in sublimation ink, developed an ink that is meant to mimic Epson genuine ink, meaning that it doesn’t need a profile. Since then, lots of lower end ink companies have been saying that their ink doesn’t need a profile. In my opinion, they say this not because it doesn’t need a profile, but because they are too cheap to make one and that is the easy way out. Be careful when sublimation ink companies claiming that their ink doesn’t need profiles. I tested out the leading sublimation inks and wrote a comparison blog post.

How Are Sublimation Printer Profiles Made?

I have actually made a couple sublimation printer profile using a colorminki, spyderprint and i1Studio devices. These are all entry level devices and professional devices can be thousand.

The software has you print a known sheet of colors and then you can scan them with profiling device and the software does the rest.  For more details, check out my post how to make sublimation profile.

Accuracy of Profiles

One very important factor here to keep in mind. Profiles are technically specific not only to the printer and ink, but also to the paper, what you are pressing. (Side Note: InkOwl will actually make you custom profiles check it out here) So when someone creates the profile, they have to make assumptions that everyone will be using the same, printer, ink, paper and substrate. This is nearly impossible since we all press a wide variety of items, thus, you may have slightly different results. Since the profile generally comes from your ink supplier, the ink and printer should be the same but your paper and substrates may play a roll in the colors you will press.

Now that I know All About Sublimation Printer Profiles, Where Do I Get Them?

Since printer profiles are specific to your printer and ink. Your ink supplier should provide you with profiles. Make sure that they provide a profile for your operating system. If you are buying cheap ink off of Ebay or Amazon, I recommend messaging the seller and asking if they offer printer profiles(they most likely don’t, or will tell you they don’t need them). Some do and some don’t. If you are just starting out and don’t have a great comprehensive of printers, I recommend using an ink that has a little more customer service. Ready to look at printers and ink options? Here are a comparison sublimation printers and a comparison of sublimation ink

XOXO,

Jane