Hi All,
Sorry about the delay...
I'm trying to finish a large job so I don't have to work over the weekend so I'm writing this (too fast) while eating lunch.
Forgive me if it jumps around a little but I hope it contributes.
FYI-1: in the following post n-color means more than 4 colors (Lc and Lm are NOT considered colors).
FYI-2: When I started there was no "Out of the box experience". No Profile support and the extent of the manufacturers liability was "does it power up when turned on". Beyond that you were on your own.
As a photographer you know that there are fundamentally 2 controls to a correct exposure: shutter speed and aperture setting. You're always pushing those controls for the best effect ie: best tonal range, deepest blacks, brightest whites, best shadow detail, best highlight detail, best color saturation etc.
With inks, that "Best" is a larger gamut (and no clogging).
Bear with me here, I don't make inks but from my experience there are fundamentally 2 things you can do to increase the gamut of an inkset, add pigment to the colors and/or add colors to the set. It's a balancing act because too much pigment clogs heads. Too little shrinks gamut.
Symphonic took another approach to this paradigm but first...
From 1991 to around 2001 I used Iris printers. I'm glad they're gone!
For the past 10 years I've been using a JV4 with a Hex (Orange Green) set in the rear and a dye (LcLm) set in the front.
As Solvent came out and became more popular Mimaki lost interest in the water based JV4 and it got increasingly difficult to get ink.
I tried Cave Paint which had a nice gamut but I had problems with clogging. I went with the Absolute Match inks and the clogging went away but the color was kind of soft (like the OEM inks of old from Mimaki and Epson). The Absolute Match inks also did not have Orange and Green so I was back to LcLm on the pigment side (hence a somewhat smaller gamut) making it a little harder to hit some Pantone colors without doing a "Spot Color replacement" and even then I had to compromise.
The early inks had softer color because there was less pigment to clog heads. That kept users up and running.
The way you increased gamut (without clogging) was to increase the number of colors in your inkset hence Hexachrome and other n-Color sets of inks in printers like mine, Encad and others.
Until I started using 3rd party inks I NEVER had clogs that I couldn't clear with a Soft cleaning and my Hex set gave me a nice gamut.
How did we configure these inks with our machines and media?
First you determine how much of each color to use (you almost never use 100% any color at this stage) and create a linearization curve.
Second you determine how much ink your media will accept. You NEVER want to ink so much that it is not totally absorbed by the inkjet receptive coating.
With my rip there are 2 ways to profile a n-color inkset.
One is to send the ink color information thru a Color Separation Rule and make a 4 color profile.
NOTE:If you can soft proof using your printer profile that's the way (or some variation) your manufacturer is profiling no matter how many colors are in your inkset! Photoshop does not support n-color profiles (AFAIK).
The other is to make a n-color profile which might provide a larger gamut and allows other options in workflow like bypassing color management and printing files in the LAB colorspace, but let's save that for later.
To create n-color profiles required much more investment in color management hardware, software and an exhausting learning curve.
OK: I've taken too much of your and my time and I have to get back to work.
Let me leave you all with the following and I'll check back tomorrow but...
Question: Does a 4c profile have a smaller gamut than a 5, 6, 7,8,9,10,11 or 12 color profile?
From my standpoint as a business person I would rather have a larger gamut using fewer (ideally 4) inks.
Sound like a pipe-dream?
Maybe it's in the Hue of the colors...
Gotta get back to work...more to follow if you want...gonna vacuum my keyboard first.
Have a great weekend all
