Gamut warning and colors performance

[Kukulcan]

Hi,

Is the gamut warning in soft proofing a good proxy for comparing colors capability of printers? (same paper of course)

I'd like to buy the new Epson R3000, so I've started to compare the gamut warning of this printer to the g.w. of prints made by an Epson 9900 for paper that I ordered online (mainly Canson Baryta), all files are in Prophoto. I found that the R3000 performs extremely close to the 9900 apart from deep oranges (of course..no orange cartridge). But are they really so close in reality? Sure not in printing dimension and price...

Could I really get A3+ prints very very similar to the ones made by a Epson 9900? Again, with the exception of orange and green... And what about fine details and B&W performance? And finally...how much count the difference of printheads? 180 nozzles vs 360 is just about printing speed or also important quality difference?

Thank you guys!!   

[Tony Jay]

Gamut warnings are unhelpful for several reasons:

1. there is no way of knowing how far out of gamut the colours are.
2. until a print is made one has no indication of how the printer will deal with the issue ie. what does the final print look like!

You are better off softproofing and changing the rendering from perceptual to relative colourimetric and checking the result.
Ultimately a print may be required to determine whether the end result is acceptable.

Regards

Tony Jay

[bjanes]

Gamut warnings are unhelpful for several reasons:

1. there is no way of knowing how far out of gamut the colours are.
2. until a print is made one has no indication of how the printer will deal with the issue ie. what does the final print look like!

You are better off softproofing and changing the rendering from perceptual to relative colourimetric and checking the result.
Ultimately a print may be required to determine whether the end result is acceptable.

Softproofing is great as long as the gamut of the monitor exceeds that of the printer. The best wide gamut monitors can reproduce 95% of the Adobe RGB gamut, but the better inkjet printers can exceed the gamut of Adobe RGB. For this reason, many experienced photographers use ProphotoRGB as their working space to ensure that they can print all the colors that have been captured.

The soft proof can not reproduce colors outside of the monitor gamut but within the gamut of the printer. In this case, the Photoshop gamut warning will show if the gamut of the image is outside that of the printer, but not by how far. For such cases one can use 3D gamut mapping software such as Colorthink or Gamut vision.

Regards,

Bill
 

[Kukulcan]

Thank you for your replies, anyway I'd like to know what you think about this particular example:

I compared the soft proofs of the Epson R3000 and the new Canon Pixma Pro for Canson and Hahnemuhle baryta papers, I used several "artificial" high saturated color images, and I noticed that the extensions of gamut warning areas were always higher for the Canon than for the Epson.
 So it looks like that the Epson can print more colors (I guess more saturated hues) even though the Pixma Pro has more inks.

Can I really rely on this kind of test? Is there any flaws?

Regards

Giuseppe

[artobest]

So many flaws ...

You said it yourself - you are checking artificial images. It's unlikely that gamut differences between these two machines would be very evident in real-world use. Besides, without knowing how far out of gamut these colours are, and how the respective perceptual intents would render these out-of-gamut colours, you can't really draw any conclusions. As the earlier poster said, you really need to see the print.

Additionally, I would add that focusing on gamut is missing a large part of the picture.

[Kukulcan]

Ok thanks you all!  it could happen that a large grayed area is just a little bit out of gamut while minor grayed areas contain very vibrant colors deep out of gamut. So comparing areas doesn't work about the intent of figuring out the look and the vibrancy of colors printed.

So let's wait for Adobe to release new PS version with...a gradient gamut warning!

I'll wait for impressions about the new Canon, then I'll decide, but I'm biased towards Epson, with respect only to print quality, Epson seem the most preferred by pros and serious amateurs in all forums (ok, probably not in a Canon forum....)