Digital BW, The Print

> Can you describe a VM workflow?  I'm curious how the (two?) inks are
mixed
> in.  I presume they're added in a density relative to the overall
gray tone
> -- that is, if you're printing a 20% gray, you get an equivalent 20%
of the
> toning inks.

Keep in mind that I don't know what I'm talking about.

But here's how I _think_ the VM inks work.

6 inks - I am taking wild guesses at the %% here, please assume they
are incorrect. You get Black (100%) Neutral Grey (75%) Blue-grey (35%)
Pale Blue-grey (12%), Warm-grey (35%), pale warm-grey (12%) 

It seems to me that what happens is basically that the printer has two
complete quadtone sets - a warm and cool set, and that it mixes equal
parts of cool and warm to make neutral for the neutral set. All of the
mixing takes place via the curve sets. So, for instance, the warm
curve sets give a false-color that is very green, because they don't
wnat to use _any_ of the magenta ink, which has the cool tones in it.
Similarly the cool curves are very red, to avoid the cyan inks, and
the neutral curves are rather purple since they have both.

Um, does that more or less answer your question? I realize that the
explanation is technically inept, but hopefully a reasonable try from
a layman's pov?


> -- 
> John Labovitz
> johnl@j...
> www.johnlabovitz.com