Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "mike_nunan"
<mike_nunan@h...> wrote:
snip...
> > It has more to do with the Epson driver than Adobe, and may be OS
> > related as you suggest (but I know little about that). Some time ago
> > Photoshop let you hit the print command with files that were high
> bit
> > (it didn't used to) but all it was doing was changing to 8 bit on
> the
> > fly as a convenience since that's what the driver accepts.
>
> If I had to put money on it, I'd bet they're still doing that.

But they really have no choice if 8 bit in is required by the driver.

snip
> I think we're at cross purposes as little bit on this point. What I'm
> trying to say is that if you can get the full range of
> colours "through" the driver without any perceptible steps between
> neighboring colours, then *in theory* you can get a good result. It's
> just a matter of knowing what mappings to do in order to hit the
> right colours, and a LUT ought to do that job just fine. Of course,
> this relies heavily upon Adobe's implementation of profile mapping,
> but the fact that very good profiles have been created for the x600
> printers does add some weight to the argument that this is all
> possible. There's no doubt that life would be much easier without all
> this hoop-jumping though!

I think we're talking about the same thing, but just disagree a tad.
I'll just wrap up my end of this by saying that the lengths Bill
Atkinson had to go to to achieve his results border on the absurd, and
by all reports he'll never do it again for any amount of money. Even
then there are things I'm still not thrilled with about his profiles.
Additionally, you won't rise to some of his levels of performance with
any profiling method currently available.
This makes me question whether or not it is in fact possible, and
really have to go back and look at the driver and alternatives to it.
Again, someone with a lot more experience profiling over liearized
RIPs and seeing the real difference could offer more insight than I,
Ernst?<G>?

Also, mapping during profile conversions has little to do with Adobe,
unless you are using the ACE engine. You do have several alternatives
to Adobe's ACE, however the difference I've seen between them are very
slight with ACE being as good or better than any of them. Also, the
profiling software itself is probably the most responsible for how
colors map to the device space and here (I think) is really the larger
problem. I've been hoping someone would have their algorithms refer to
Lindbloom's perceptually uniform LAB space just to see what happens,
but no one has stepped up to the plate as far as I know. The different
packages I've used all seem to characterize a device just fine and
similarly, but the decisions they make about LAB to device conversion
remains an "art" they all do differently.
I'm probably taking up too much of B&W list space with this color
stuff, and I'm on the edge of spouting BS, I highly recommend the
Colorsync list, many discussions to wade through, but much there to learn.

> Yeah, I hear that. I'm just trying my best to create a setup that
> will give me results that are "perfect enough". As I said before, I'm
> actually pretty satisfied with a good majority of the colour images
> I'm getting from the Epson driver. Of course it would be nice to
> increase the percentage even further =)

I've seen a few posts here and there about the current (official, not
alpha or beta) Gimp drivers being more well behaved, and someone just
asked on the Colorsync list about profiling over them, you might want
to check it out.
Tyler