Digital BW, The Print

Antonis:

The behavior of the Ink Jet Control application does not seem to conform to
the traditional prepress standards for ink limiting and I am trying to
figure out what is happening here. By that I mean that traditional cmyk
curves relate to actual ink percentages as used to print and the ink limit
is built in to the curves.

In the IJC app it seems ink limiting is handled behind the scenes somehow,
where one dials in the appropriate step value and that value determines the
ink limit.

Once this new limit is applied it is not reflected by a redrawing of the
crossover curves. Therefore I'm led to conclude that the crossover curves do
not represent real ink percentages, but conform to some other standard which
I don't see documented anywhere.

In addition the "ink color" patch values seem hard to determine, one is left
having to visually match them to actual ink colors somehow?

It seems that one is left trying to generate a new "ink formula" flying
blind (the use of the word profile here I believe to be inappropriate). One
is drawing curves that relate to indefinate values and the only visual
feedback is via color patches which are likely to be extremely inaccurate.

Am I missing something here? How would one accurately assign values to the
ink patches to get a reasonable preview of banding problems etc. And what
values do the crossover curves actually represent, a percentage of a
percentage?

The linearization feature seems superb, very well thought out. It would be
nice if this could be used "stand alone" for linearizing a variety of
printing behaviors, not just OPM. ImagePrint, or other quadtone workflows
come to mind. All that would be needed is rgb target values documented
somehere, or just have a small target provided that could be printed via
other applications. 200.00 for this feature alone would be money well spent.

I think it is also important to add that the "print dialog" is hands down
the best I've ever seen. It might be nice to pull the single vs multi pass
option out of preferences but other than that it's great.

Best wishes,

Nick Wheeler