There are a variety of test images available on the Web that can be useful for testing the color rendition of your printer. Here are links to some of the more popular ones:
• PhotoDisc Target as a JPEG (4MB)
• PhotoDisc Target as a TIFF (32MB)
• Digital Dog (Andrew Rodney)

Note the PhotoDisc Targets are Stuffit (.sit) files, and the Digital Dog file is in hqx format. Most Macintosh users already have the software to deal with these images, but Windows users typically don't. You can get a free utility from Aladdin Systems to that will make the files usable on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux systems.
Here's the link to the Aladdin Systems Expander: http://www.aladdinsys.com/expander/

You can save this image on your own computer and play with it to your heart's content. Here's how to do it with Internet Explorer running under Windows: Right-click on the image Select "Save Picture As..." Choose the drive and directory you want to save the file in Click on "Save" You can also save the file using Netscape or even while browsing using the Mac (where the concept of right-clicking is somewhat foreign). On a Mac with Netscape position the cursor on the picture then press and hold the mouse button. After about a second a menu will pop up -- choose "Save this Image as ...".		Fuji Calibration image from www.querandi.demon.co.uk. Normally I prefer to link to other sites that have already posted what we are looking for, but this one is buried in frames and it's hard to tell people how to get to the image. So I've copied it here merely as a matter of convenience. I do strongly recommend you go to the site and look at their tutorials and other material. This sRGB image is 5" x 7" at 300dpi and is just under a megabyte. It will take some time to load.

I developed a series of test panels to see how smoothly one color blends into another. I did this because some profiles I was creating gave rise to very bizarre prints of skies. What was happening was that the profiles had some artifacts in them that caused a 50% blue, 48% green, 0% red to look very similar to a 52% blue, 48% green, 0% red, but neither was at all close to a 51% blue, 48% green, 0% red. But that third color was supposed to be between the other two!

There are some problems with these test panels that you should be aware of:
• The eye can readily discern banding and sudden color shifts in the blends, and useful in doing so. However, it is not a good judge of whether the actual colors printed are correct.

• Depending on the color space you are using, some of the colors represented may be unreal. For instance, if you print this from an sRGB color space all the colors are real and are reproduceable on a monitor, as well as many of the better inkjet printers.

  If, however, you print the test panels from a very wide gamut color space (like Pro Photo RGB) the saturated blue is quite literally unreal (look at Andrew Rodney's article Gamut Maps to see what I mean). In this case if you set the "Rendering Intent" to "Absolute Colorimetric" there is no way any printer can print some of the colors -- what you should see is a nice blending of colors up to a hard arc-shaped edge, and a solid fill color on the other side of that edge.

  I've found these panels most useful when I use a "real" colorspace like Adobe RGB and use "Perceptual" as the rendering intent.

You can save this image on your own computer and play with it to your heart's content. Here's how to do it with Internet Explorer running under Windows: Right-click on the image Select "Save Picture As..." Choose the drive and directory you want to save the file in Click on "Save" You can also save the file using Netscape or even while browsing using the Mac (where the concept of right-clicking is somewhat foreign). On a Mac with Netscape position the cursor on the picture then press and hold the mouse button. After about a second a menu will pop up -- choose "Save this Image as ...".

What are the panels? Each of the 12 panels is made up of three layers:
• Blue, which ranges from 0% on the bottom to 100% at the top.
• Green, which ranges from 0% on the left to 100% on the right.
• Red, which is a fixed value for each of the panels.
• The bottom-left panel has 0% red, the one above it is 8.33% red, and so on until you get to the top-right panel, which is 100% red.
• And, of course, the bar across the bottom is a gradated gray that ranges from 100% black on the left to 100% white on the right.