Digital BW, The Print

Bert Katzung wrote:

>Hi Eric:
>It's been quite a while for me also, since I last saw a Seurat live, but my 
>impression was exactly the same as yours. Quite amazing how he constructed 
>the visual impression of colors with dots of other colors.
>
>And  I  agree that "giclee"  sounds affected. Well, back to old "Black & 
>white inkjet print" <G>.
>
>Regards,
>
>Bert
>  
>
There's quite a difference between the more or less additive color 
mixing of pointillism and the subtractive color mixing of printing. One 
of the reasons the Seurats do not deliver strong colors is in the 
inefficiency of additive mixing on reflective surfaces. Thta kind of 
color mixing needs a lot of light and that's achieved best with 
transparant colors or fluorescents and light getting through the 
colorants like in monitors, LED displays and in the past with the 
Autochrome slides. So the BO link with Seurat isn't on topic, the Giclee 
link isn't much better ...... There were however some pop art artists 
that used big enlargements of CMYK subtractive prints. Reproducing 
pointillism paintings with the usual RGB filtering in scans and digital 
photography + the translation to CMYK subtractive reproduction is 
difficult. Spectral scan and printing methods are now used to overcome 
that problem. This will become the high end of art reproduction anyway 
as in painting the use of many different colorants and the way they are 
applied, opaque, transparent layers etc varies per painting and even 
within one painting.

Subtractive color printing has it flaws as well. In the highlights the 
dot size of CMY inks isn't covering the total white area of the paper 
which would be best for subtractive mixing. Using the LC and LM inks 
increases the coverage though and by that the subtractive mixing 
quality. That results in a (slightly) wider gamut of CcMmYK inksets 
compared to CMYK inksets. Best subtractive mixing is available in 
today's color films and prints, conventional rotogravure color printing, 
etc that are covering the total area with CMY(K) layers that vary in 
density  per spot.

Ernst