Welcome to Pure Profiles

If you're having problems with your printer with colour casts or inaccurate colours, and you're looking to improve your photo printing, then it's likely that we can solve it for you. Our aim is to provide you with a professional ICC profile that will allow you to print accurate colours every time, at a price which is affordable to everyone - from the professional photographer, to the home enthusiast. By using the latest professional tools (GretagMacbeth \ X-rite's Eye One Pro and ProfileMaker Pro), combined with our years of experience in profiling and computer imaging, we will try to make your profiling experience an easy and enjoyable one. Our comprehensive step-by-step guides will guide you through the process, and we will always answer any questions that you might have. If you're not sure how easy this can be, then please take a look at our testimonials page to see what our customers think of our service.

Our Prices

What can a profile do for me?

When you print a photo, the printer uses generic settings to choose how the colours should appear. This may look good for certain papers, but there are major limitations. Change to a different paper, and the colours will look different. Change to a different type of ink, and the colours will look different again. Add in wear and tear to the printer, and your colours can change again. Colour casts may appear, and details within the print may become lost, resulting in lots of paper and ink used whilst trying to get a good print. And that's all before you even try to get your prints to match with the colours on your monitor. Does this sound familiar?

This is what profiles are designed to fix. A profile is a basically a description of how your printer prints colours on a particular paper. With colour management enabled, it's used within the conversion process of the image as it is sent to the printer, so that the colours are printed as accurately as possible. A good profile will mean that you only have to print the photo once - no Photoshop adjustment of colours needed - just accurate colours every time. If you have your monitor calibrated, you will also get the benefit of having a print that matches what you see on screen, making colour editing a breeze.

What are the limitations of a profile?

A profile is designed to be highly accurate, but it is very specific to what is being used with your printer. Your printer colour output changes if you change the paper, type of ink, or some of the printer driver settings. A profile has to be created based on one set of these, and the same settings, paper and ink have to be used each time it is used. Changing any of these can result in poor results (please note that the profile does not depend on the size of the paper - a profile created on A4 paper can still be used on 6x4 paper).

What's the difference between a generic and a custom profile?

You can often get a generic profile for free from your printer site. These have usually been created based on a sample group of printers, and can usually get you better colour than without using a profile. However, the actual colour output of a printer varies from one to the other, even if they are the same model. There will be a tolerance range for the output of the printer in the manufacturing process to determine whether the ouput is acceptable. Generally, the more consumer level printers will have a much wider tolerance range compared to the professional level printers. Now if your printer is at one end of that range, and the generic profile is more in the middle, then your colours will not look that good. Factor in that the output of a printer changes considerably over time due to wear and tear to the printhead, and even changes in a printer driver update can affect the colour output, and you will see how a generic profile will not give you the very best colours. This is where a custom profile helps - it's designed to get the optimum output from your printer, on the paper of your choice, based on the colours your printer can output.

Is my system compatible?

At Pure Profiles, we specialise in RGB ICC profiles. For almost all inkjet (Epson, Canon, HP etc.), dye-sub and laser printers that have a Windows or Mac printer driver, then this will be the profile that you need. For the profiling process to work, you will also need your printing software to be compatible with the process. Software which is compatible includes Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Qimage. Please take a look at Compatibility for a full list of the software that we know is compatible, and for any specific instructions for other printers or software.

How do I order a profile?

Please just place an order online with us - there's a very quick registration and ordering process, and then you'll be able to keep track of your order by looking at your account. You'll be given a unique code to write on your charts, so all you need to send us is the charts - we'll identify the charts by the code. We can also accept orders by email if you prefer.

How long does a profile remain accurate?

Generally profiles remain accurate for a long time - for a lot of our home users, we'd say the profile will give good results for as long as the printer lasts. However the accuracy will drift over time due to wear and tear to the printhead. If you use your printers regularly, then you might find you need to reprofile every now and then - some of our professional photographers reprofile as often as every six months, but a reprofile every one to two years would probably be beneficial for most others.

Why should I choose Pure Profiles?

We've been supplying profiles since 2005, and have many satisified customers - please take a look at testimonials page for what people think - many of whom had never tried profiles before, and were surprised by the results.

We only use the highest quality equipment and software (GretagMacbeth \ X-rite's Eye One Pro and ProfileMaker Pro)- there is cheaper equipment out there, but the results of our profiles speal for themselves.

We also understand how important customer support is when dealing with the often confusing world of colour management - we don't just send the profile out to you and then abandon you - we will do our utmost to solve any problems you have, and that can be very important when choosing someone to create a profile for you. Not all profiles work straight away for a variety of reasons (blocked printer nozzles, wrong paper type selected, a mistake made in the settings), and we'll work with you until we have a profile, even if that means scanning in extra charts. We also have had many comments praising our step-by-step guides - making sure the settings are correct is one of the most important factors in getting a profile to work, so we were determined to make sure that the guides are as easy to follow as possible.

Money Back Guarantee

There's one last thing which we hope will help convince you to give profiling a try with us ... a money back guarantee! If you are not satisifed with the results, and we can't solve it for you within a reasonable time period, then we'll be happy to give you your money back.