thanks for the replies so far. i have an epson 3380 that is just over 2 years old now i think, i got it to replace an r2400 that died. i have been printing every week, mostly (you guys are going to think i'm crazy) on epson glossy or luster, and it's a test image from andrew's site i believe. big grey microscopic balls or whatever in the middle, some red strawberries on the right and nice color gradients. i know this is probably the worst image to mess around with saturation as it comes with large gamut and large range of extreme colors (the gradients).
as i have been doing these test prints, i kept thinking i wish i could get more saturation. that turned into what's the best way to get more saturation. i have a custom paper profile for 1 paper - the baryta photographique from canson. but, i'm not printing on that paper because it's a lot more expensive
mainly my weekly prints are just to keep the printer from getting dried out.
ANYWAY - as i've been playing around specifically with that image, i can bring OOG colors back into gamut with darkening and desaturating certain areas of the image, but in the long run it just seems like i'm back at an overall less saturated image. meaning the top of the RGB and CMY gradients are pretty dull looking again as though i never oversaturated the image.
plus i'm finding that there are a lot of colors in that image that just aren't a strong suit of the 3880. which i think can be said of many printers.
i have been able to get nice saturated strawberries, while the colors are not that much OOG, just a few gray patches here an there when i turn on photoshop's OOG warning.
captured images in the real world, for example i just shot a wedding for a friend not long ago, generally don't have a lot of OOG colors. well, except for photos i shot of the couple in a garden where the yellows oranges reds and purples of the flowers were OOG.
so then i started thinking about all this again and forgot most of what i remember from the r2400 days. and the bottom line again for me i think is, soft proof yes and try to make some small corrections. but rely on photoshop's perceptual or rel. colormetric rendering to move things where they need to be because it's probably a lot more accurate than i can be.
and to just say something out loud mostly for my own benefit, Relative Colormetric will be a faithful print of colors that are within gamut, but those that are out of gamut are changed to fit. Perceptual, with "crush" all colors that are out of gamut and in gamut, with some sort of calculated "curve".
so to me that means some photos which do not have many OOG colors are best printed (depending on previewing between the two) with Rel Col. some prints that have many OOG colors could be better printed with perceptual.
but then, i get back to trying to oversaturate... where it may push more and more colors OOG... so that's when i started thinking about what best to do there.
as another example, i have a photo of a diner on a street. the diner is white stucco, the building next to it has old world orange/red brick and there is a bright blue sign with neon red light. when i crank up the saturation of the photo, the bright blue sign (never mind the neon tubing) and orange/red brick get way out of gamut. so then what do i do? well, i desaturated and darkened those area a bit. the overall photo still seems good, but the blue sign and orange/red brick are a little disappointedly less saturated. in fact, i'll attach that photo here - in it's "unsaturated" form in ProPhoto tagged image made small.
i know it's pretty saturated now, but if i were going to do some crazy color abstract...
