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Comment on Might Want To Hold Up On That Upgrade by Typhoon

Typhoon — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:51:27 +0000

Just to update this: I’m told by Onyx that I misunderstood what they were telling me when I called this in, and that it’s not all machines with a display, just all Jetis.

So if you’ve got a Nur or a Vutek or a whatever else, evidently this is not an issue for you.

Comment on Color Managed iPhones? by Neil

Neil — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 04:33:16 +0000

“…why bother?”
I printed a few ‘we need these large photos of mom near the casket’ photos.
And for the first time ever, I delivered perfectly neutral grays in b&w photos from a post Correct Color color corrected printer. That’s why.

Comment on East Coast Opportunity by Daniel Joseph Donnelly

Daniel Joseph Donnelly — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:46:07 +0000

Interested in sharing w/ my production team if applicable, call my cell 404-375-4982. Thanks

Comment on East Coast Opportunity by Daniel Joseph Donnelly

Daniel Joseph Donnelly — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:44:47 +0000

Interested in sharing with my production team if applicable.
Call ne at 404-375-4982. Thanks

Comment on Who is the Alien Girl? by John Smith

John Smith — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 06:59:32 +0000

All I know about this image that it is part of NUR Macroprint campaign for one of the big shows. Maybe somebody of NUR veterans can add more details.

Comment on Lost in East LA… by Cv

Cv — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:20:03 +0000

But, did the phone recover? Or is that chapter two?

Comment on As interchangeable as piston rods… by Typhoon

Typhoon — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:22:11 +0000

Josef, I can save you a little bit of trouble. I've profiled Rhos in exactly the scenario you describe, and they're pretty small-gamut machines. You're not going to get a bigger gamut than Gracol out of a Rho. However, there are several UV machines out there that do have bigger gamuts than Gracol. Here are a few if you want to go look: Gandi 1224 HP-Scitex FB950 Oce Arizona 250GT These are all UV machines printing in a production environment and all of them are on their middle resolution in basically "production" mode. On all of them I've positioned the slice to show the machine to its maximum advantage, but it needs to be remembered that in the areas where Gracol falls outside the gamut of the machine, sending the machine Gracol files won't make it print there. Only the areas where the two color spaces overlap are available in both spaces--as I'm sure you probably already know. So even on the Rho, isn't better to linearize it and profile it and use a workflow for it that's the same as all the bigger gamut machines in a shop? At least you take full advantage of what's there. And of course that's just UV. And of all inkjet printers, UV machines tend to be the smallest gamut. Most shops I work with are not UV only. They've got some UV and some solvent. And the gamut of any decent solvent machine dwarfs Gracol: Mutoh ValueJet This is just a plain-old garden variety ValueJet right in your backyard as it happens. What it comes down to to me is this: The procedures that I use on inkjets grew up in and evolved in and are therefore designed and adapted specifically to the needs of inkjet printers. G7 was developed specifically as a way to linearize litho presses. When you boil it down past the sales pitch, that's really all it does. Is that a good and necessary thing? Oh hell yeah. Does that make it the optimum way to get optimum performance out of an inkjet printer? I say no. Mike

Comment on As interchangeable as piston rods… by Josef_F

Josef_F — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:48:16 +0000

I’m totally engrossed with this argument and having learned color management both ways now I’m still not sure what the best way is either. Like color it seems color management is also subjective. I’m not very satisfied with that answer though so I think I’ll have to do some testing this next week and see if I can come up with an answer to the greater gamut argument. In my little experience I have not found that Grand Format UV printers can achieve a greater gamut than gracol, which is what we base our work flow around. I will be testing different ways of calibrating and profiling on a Durst Rho 800 using both Caldera to calibrate and Manaco to Profile. I’ll let you know what I come up with next week.

Comment on As interchangeable as piston rods… by Typhoon

Typhoon — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:46:06 +0000

Interesting argument, but I still can’t say I agree.

Fact is in my experience, a goodly percentage of the work done by large and grand format printers isn’t produced by agencies. In many cases, it’s produced right there in house. In many more, it’s a hybrid process. And oftentimes the image itself is unique, such as a vehicle wrap.

However I’d point out you’re arguing something a little contradictory here. If an image is SWOP and approved as SWOP and SWOP is what the buyer wants, then the only option is to emulate SWOP. Regardless of the gamut of the machine. That would by definition preclude the scenario you describe. And if your machine is properly profiled, that’s in essence what you’re doing when you send the file through the RIP to its destination space.

The best way to get maximum gamut out of any device is to create the state of the machine at its maximum printing conditions, characterize it in that state, then send it files that make maximum use of that characterization. Which is easily done in a “late-binding” workflow.

As far as individual colors, my advice to all my customers once they’ve got bulletproof profiles is to use PMS. After all, there’s no L*a*b* value that relates to 100% of this or 100% of that in all color spaces, so CMYK percentages are hardly a professional way to make a call for color in a file. Best to call a PMS color and let the RIP do the work.

Again, as I said, it’s not my intent to knock G7. I think it’s the way to go in litho. And I know there are a lot of big outfits now with big budgets and high-powered salesmen out there telling anyone and everyone that G7 is the only way to print. And of course everyone I know knows that salesmen always listen to the customer’s needs and recommend exactly what’s right for them even if it isn’t the product they happen to be selling.

Ahem…

But G7’s inherent advantages–and even its initial reason for being are–to me–significantly lost in the process of digital printing.

Mike

Comment on As interchangeable as piston rods… by Roberto Michelena

Roberto Michelena — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:21:11 +0000

Well…. unknowingly you’ve just laid out the reasons why to use G7 on wide and grand format printing.
You see, unfortunately still most of the ad agencies and/or designers like to hand out CMYK files (usually in SWOP space) as final work.
And also unfortunately, all current ICC implementations in wide and grand format RIPs incur in some gamut compression when handling transforms (maybe PrintFactory is an exception because it allows for device-link tuning).
So whatever started with a beatiful large-gamut RGB photo or illustration, was first compressed to the SWOP space, and then further compressed in the wide/grand format RIP. Yes, even though going to a bigger gamut, it does get compressed a little. And not only that: what was -regardless of the color accuracy and for sake of the image’s ‘pop’- meant to be pure C+M blue or M+Y red, gets contaminated in the name of color accuracy, that as you properly imply is not always the goal of outdoor advertising.
So, here comes G7: with a properly ” G7′d ” grand format printer/rip, you can just feed it the ignorantly produced swop-CMYK file and get your device’s gamut back while still keep the image looking mostly as intended, with proper contrast and gray balance, but with the saturated colors uncontaminated and as bright and shiny as your printer can.

And there are other ways to accomplish this, like using a synthethic ‘wide CMYK’ or ‘big CMYK’ profile as source to enhance the gamut, and pairing this with a RIP that allows for pure hue protection in primary and secondary colors (like Photoprint does)… but none will get as much gamut out of your printer as G7.