Agfa Colortune Pro

[seratne]

We just this week had our new ApogeeX workflow, Xcalibur platesetter, and Sherpa proofer installed. I've setup the curves for the Xcalibur and all of that is fine, but Agfa's colortune software seems to be missing something for creating profiles. A way to talk to the spectrophotomer (DTP45). Their documentation mentions that you need to read in the strips through another program and have it save as a text document. Question is what program? There doesn't seem to be anything in the client or QMSX. Any help?

[baggie]

Hello seratne - you don't mention what you are trying to do with your colortune software - I guess that you are trying to make an ICC profile either for the Sherpa or some kind of output color space (a press?). Firstly - you need a colortune dongle, without this you will not have access to the parts of colortune that can be used to create a new output profile. If you do have a dongle then it's possible - but you are quite correct - colortune does not talk directly to any input spectrophotometers. You need a separate application to do the measurements. Agfa have an application called 'Sherpa CMS' that does this which you can presumably get from them locally? You can use this software to print and measure your target strips and then save that as a file for importing into colortune.
good luck
baggie

[hopkinsprinting]

Seratne,

While I am not an ApogeeX user yet, when we got Apogee Series 3 along with a Sherpa 43, there was a proofer pack that came with it which included ColorTune, QMS, as well as an X-Rite DTP41 Spectrophotometer (at least that's how I remember it). I know things have changed with ApogeeX so I am not sure how they package everything now, but I would have thought that they still provide the proofer pack with the Sherpa???

Currently we use QMS for doing baseline calibration, proof to proof, proof to reference in combination with the DTP41. Aside from that, I have an IT8 target that I output and take measurements of it with a Spectrolino/Spectroscan (Gretag MacBeth product) for creating proofer profiles.

I hope this helps!
Jon :-)

[seratne]

We finally got up and running, or should I say that one of the techs decided to bring in the software. Apparently Agfa was using some Gretag software to read in the targets. But due to some licensing :wink: "issues". They've developed their own software to read in the targets, Sherpa CMS. And now I understand Agfa's color managed workflow.

Use QMSX to basically baseline the proofer, then use Sherpa CMS to print out and read in a target. Sherpa CMS then creates a text document that you bring into Colortune Pro to create the icc profile.

Three applications on two workstations that I used to be able to do all in one. Progress?