Digital BW, The Print

> Dan, I'm always intrigued by these ideas. I keep wondering what sort of "mode"
> we'd need in Photoshop. Some sort of
> multichannel mode that has custom ink setups? Then a multichannel RIP?
> Tyler

Presuming you are crazy enough (see last post) to want to do the separations
in Photoshop what you would need is a RIP that prints spot channels.  One
RIP manufacturer (Best RIP I think) told me that his RIP already took each
channel as it came and printed it to each head for as many channels as you
make and/or the printer has heads.  There are already Photoshop plugins
that take RGB files and separate them into hex channels and other plugins
that allow you to craft a set of "bump plates" to lay in non-CMYK inks such
as extra blues etc. into CMYK files as spot channels.  These are made for
six ink presses where you can print a couple of extra inks (any inks) at a
premium price. The pieces are probably already there for desktop printers if
you want to spend enough.  But I question if there will be enough people who
like separating their own channels to make any such solution cheap enough to
use with a cheap desktop printer.

On the grayscale front - Red, Green, and Blue inks with three grays is
already doable with the old Yarc 7000 Xtreme.  Not totally sure how to
softproof profile it but I have some ideas.  That is an experiment I will
probably try when 7000s are cheap enough for me to buy a couple.

Dan