Do Press House Professionals Using CMYK for 8-Ink Printer

[EinstStein]

I am reading a book by Daniel Margulis, "Professional Photoshop, The Classical Guide for Color Correction", in which he talks very high about the CMYK color space. CMYK is the color space for all professional press house professionals.
If I understand it right, the CMYK color space deals directly how the inks are laid on the paper for the image. Other color spaces would need another level of translation, which is likely to introduce deviation, color clipping, for example.
By the way, his book also values very high on LAB.
It is very convincing. However, I don;'t understand if this reasoning also applies to the printer that has more than CMYK inks. All high end color photo printers as I know use 8 or 10 inks.

I think all color space can work, as long as you know what you are doing. The consumer photo print lab I deal with uses sRGB, Adobe RGB is used when it is more serious, and Kodak Pro Color RGB is what I use with my own printer.  CMYK is rarely talked about.
But if I switch to CMYK, would I see better growing opportunity?
 

[Czornyj]

Forget it. Modern 8-12 colour inkjet printers are RGB devices, so you can't really use CMYK when printing from driver. You'd need an expensive RIP to drive it as CMYK device, and there's a small chance you'd gain any benefit, maybe you could save some ink at best.

CMYK is an optimal colour space when you simply need to control channels, for example to get pure black text, clean colours without small intrusions of other channels, save ink or avoid metameric issues in grayscale images so it's useful in offset/gravure/flexo etc. printing industry. Modern inkjet printer is a whole different animal. Qualitywise it's much, much better in every respect, and you don't really need to deal with all that stuff.

[EinstStein]

Thanks a lot. Your web site is very convincing.
Now you've save my breath from CMYK, what about LAB? Under what condition it's worth to consider (say, over Kodak Pro Color RGB or Adobe RGB)?

[Czornyj]

I don't use it for image editing - it's not an editing space, it has limitations, it's not intuitive. I prefer ACR/LR tools and RGB workflow.

I'd appreciate a decent 3DLUT editor to create my own 3DLUT presets for CS6 Color Lookup Adjustments or custom DNG profiles to achieve some special color effects, but that's another story.

[Luca Ragogna]

Dan's book was written in the 90's and is for prepress operators. It refers to printing on a printing press not printing with an inkjet. Color management has come a LONG way since then and Dan was an opponent of colour management at the time he wrote that book. He's updated more than a few times since I've read his book and don't really know what his stance is now.

Also at the time he wrote the book it was routine to have to do a lot of colour correction before printing. A photo was made on film, scanned, output to colour separated film, plates were burned and then the pressman fiddled with a bunch of settings on press to get something printed. Now you have a digital image that gets output directly to plates and the software calculates the ink key settings automatically. There's a lot less steps involved and less loss of image quality as well as fewer places for an image to get messed up.There's not much need to do editing in LAB anymore.