Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "Austin Franklin" <darkroom@i...> wrote:
snip
> What do you mean by "ramping in the driver"?

I'm right on the edge of jumping into areas I know nothing about here. In some posts by the Gimp Print developer, I got the 
impression that there is flexibility in how tonal values are assigned to dithers within the driver, and the process in general 
was referred to as ramping. So some ink partitioning could be happenning at that point.
I'm going to ignore the whole postscript aspect of RIPs because that's out of my realm. Beyond that, think of a CMYK RIP as 
simply a 4 channel driver, directly connecting each of your 4 channels in a Photoshop CMYK file to the apropriate color in 
the printer. Like any other printer driver, it has to dither as well. Many RIPs do NOT dither well compared the the Epson 
driver.
But, assuming you're not going through a profile or some other adjustment on the fly, any change you make to your 
magenta channel (for example) in Photoshop, will directly affect that ink on paper, and none other. No muxing it up through 
a CMYK to RGB to CMYK transition like the Epson driver. They tend to have many other built in controls too, and there's the 
whole postscript thing, but that's the jist of it for our purposes.
More sensible?
Tyler