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Author Topic: Mirage RIP question?  (Read 8581 times)

MarkFarber

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Re: Mirage RIP question?
« Reply #20 on: June 27, 2017, 08:57:57 am »

I have little experience with RIPs, and I don't understand the notion of a "driver extender."  I do know that I can (and love to) use Mirage to print panos on my Epson 3880, bypassing the 37" driver limit.  But Mirage says they cannot do the same with the Canon Pro-1000.
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Farmer

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Re: Mirage RIP question?
« Reply #21 on: June 27, 2017, 07:51:41 pm »

Mirage is not a "driver extended" product.  It can address the hardware directly.
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Phil Brown

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Re: Mirage RIP question?
« Reply #22 on: February 14, 2018, 03:03:20 am »

It seems that the subject of RIP seems to be a bit of a black hole on this forum. Let me try and shine some light into it. Technically a CMYK RIP lets you adjust the individual inks independent of one another. The old X-Proof by Colorburst did this. I used it for years. The majority of the products most useful and easiest to use for photographers today are RGB RIPs which means they use the front end of the manufacturers driver. They do however and this is most important drive the printer directly and avoid the CMM(Color Management Module) in Adobe and the computer's OS. This makes the color more accurate and more importantly infinitely repeatable. In addition you can print at twice the resolution of Photoshop.( 720 vs. 360 DPI).  I hope this answers a few of the questions and corrects some misunderstandings. I have been printing through RIPs for 15 years and wouldn't consider printing any other way.
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stcstc31

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Re: Mirage RIP question?
« Reply #23 on: February 14, 2018, 05:43:28 am »

mirage is not a full functioning rip


I have been using since v1

it happily runs both canon and epson, i have a 9900 and a pro4000 running with it

BUT it uses the adobe CMM module,
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Stephen Crozier

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Ernst Dinkla

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Re: Mirage RIP question?
« Reply #24 on: February 14, 2018, 07:26:00 am »

It seems that the subject of RIP seems to be a bit of a black hole on this forum. Let me try and shine some light into it. Technically a CMYK RIP lets you adjust the individual inks independent of one another. The old X-Proof by Colorburst did this. I used it for years. The majority of the products most useful and easiest to use for photographers today are RGB RIPs which means they use the front end of the manufacturers driver. They do however and this is most important drive the printer directly and avoid the CMM(Color Management Module) in Adobe and the computer's OS. This makes the color more accurate and more importantly infinitely repeatable. In addition you can print at twice the resolution of Photoshop.( 720 vs. 360 DPI).  I hope this answers a few of the questions and corrects some misunderstandings. I have been printing through RIPs for 15 years and wouldn't consider printing any other way.

This message creates some confusion too, which is understandable as the there is a wide variety in RIPs, drivers, Semi-RIP front ends, suiting a wide variety of properties in printers.

A color engine is needed anyway, either the one from the OS the RIP is running on or an independent one. The last can be licensed, for example an open source one like LCMS. A semi RIP (front end) like Qimage Ultimate use the printer manufacturer's drivers but has LCMS as the color engine. However it does not use the CMYK side of that engine, you can only load RGB and Grayscale images and it does the translation to the printer driver RGB input side according the image assigned color space and the printer profile. So like RGB-device CM, comparable to CM for a monitor but with rendering choices. That means in the media preset chosen in the printer driver the RGB>CMYK translation descriptions are kept. Black box for the user. A printer like that can still have a calibration set up (integrated or external spectrometer, integrated densitometer) that takes care of color constancy over time. Adobe's, Apple's, Microsoft's, LCMS, Kodak"s, ArgyllCMS color engines are all quite reliable color engines these days, there can be slight differences in the rendering algorithms on perceptual, BPC, etc but the usual color print problems are user created or printer hardware problems and not bad color engines.

The Epson Photo Printer  drivers can be set to a print quality that requests 720 PPI input. QU adds a step beyond that which extrapolates to 1440 PPI input, a kind of overdrive, I still guess comparable to sub pixel methods. The same but up to 1200 PPI input for Canon/HP.  BTW, an early HP Z3100 driver had 1200 input factory wise. RIPS can have more odd dpi print output resolutions though, I recall the Wasatch SoftRip driver for the Epson 10000 having something like 540x1080 ? dpi droplet lay down which was not present in the manufacturer's driver.

Some true RIPs; the ones with their own resampling algorithms, with their own dithering/stochastic/etc algorithms for laying down the droplets, the ones that translate RGB to CMYK, accept both RGB and CMYK images + fonts and vectors on one print page, that interpret Postscript like that, have Pantone substitution for spot color etc, nest images, add registration marks for cutting plotters or sheet cutters. Can address N-color printers. Create color separation films for conventional printing. They may still not let the users access the inks individually when creating the CMYK printer profiles that contain the color mixing recipes; UCR, GCR, Hue/Saturation color ink substitution, drying time, paper feed speed alterations, head height, etc etc. The Wasatch SoftRIP has ink limitations, one can set the transfer point between C and LC ink, M and LM ink but 3K-4K is not getting more than that, a true quad set up is impossible.  Ergosoft RIPs have more choices. Access to the individual inks can vary a lot between RIPs.

The QTR  QuadTone RIP at least can address the individual inks but as a B&W RIP in the first place it lacks a color engine.  A lot of other RIP functions are not there either. IMHO still a RIP as it has its own system of translation the (grayscale) pixels to the ink droplets. No OEM driver in between.

Met vriendelijke groet, Ernst

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« Last Edit: February 16, 2018, 05:19:15 am by Ernst Dinkla »
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