After you have measured your printer profile target you save this as an ICC profile for AVA to use. The are a number of recommended presets: Best for Separated Design, Best for Image, Best for Flat Colour and Compatible with AVA 3.4 or you can click Advanced and customise the profile settings further.
The recommended presets are different combinations of the Advanced setting, if for example you select the 'Best for Separated Design' preset then click Advanced you will see all the settings that this preset is using, as shown below.
The presets that come with PrinterCal are generally useful settings determined by lots of printing experiments with a range of designs so unless you have specific profile mapping problems we would not suggest adjusting the Advanced settings. Essentially all these options determine how out of gamut colours behave as they come back into your printer's colour space.
The Preset names are reasonably self explanatory and generally you would only see much difference when colours in your designs are out for the printer's gamut range. Below is a brief explanation of each preset and when to use it.
Best for Separated Design
Gives you the most colour accurate printing, this is our default profile option normally used for spot separated files.
DeleteBest for Image
This preset, is technically less accurate but if your printing none separated designs your probably less concerned about this and prefer the brighter more contracting image you tend to get with this setting.
DeleteBest for Flat Colour
If your designs are none tonal you may prefer the results with this preset, it retains the most saturated version of out of gamut colours, however if you designs have some tones in they could look usual.
DeleteCompatible with AVA 3.4
This preset actually saves the ICC profile in the old ICC version 2 format so it's compatible with old versions of AVA and some RIP applications that do not support the latest ICC format profiles.
DeleteAdvanced options - Gamut Mapping Methods and Colour Space
Most of these options are colour space / gamut mapping algorithms defined by the International Commission on Illumination (usually abbreviated CIE for its French name, Commission internationale de l'éclairage) you find information on what they mean from their documentation papers. The AVA Gamut mapping methods are variants of the CUSP algorithms.
There is no perfect gamut mapping option, we think the AVA Presets are the best combination of settings, but the other settings are available for users to experiment with to see if they can improve the result for a particular printer or design style.
Other options in the Advanced dialog have help tags, so if you hover your cursor over them you will get an explanation of what each option will change.
Gamut Compression and Hue Shift
These are options recommended only for AVA internal use as used incorrectly will produce unexpected results.