> This sounds a little confused. I can't imaging anyone wanting to print their > portfolio from photoshop through a rip. There would be no advantage to doing > this as photoshop is a pixel based application and a rip is specifically > designed for dealing with vector / text information. >
Using a RIP gives you complete control on how ink is put on the paper. Most (not all) RIPs are CMYK based, meaning that you can specify exactly how much ink will be put on the paper, how much black ink is used and how dark a colour has to be to use black ink. You don't have any control over the black ink at all if you use any of the built in drivers, as they are all RGB based. This control over the black gives you a much smoother looking print that with the standard driver. This is escecially true with the large format 6 colour inkjets. ie Epson 5000,7000,7500,9000,9500,10000. The problem is that because the black ink is so much darker than the rest of the inks, if you use it in too lighter a colour the grain is very obvious. The newer 7 colour inkjets are much better because they have a 'light black' which stops the speckled effect. > A rip is primarily designed to interpret this vector / text info and deal > with aspects of cmyk colour separation on the way to offset litho. Often > rips will deal with aspects of colour fidelity at the expense of print > quality. Designers tend to be more interested in looking at how the artwork > is going to look on press rather than achieving that 'photo-quality' look > that photographers want. > Tradionaly yes. RIPs only ran imagesetters to output to film and so were all cmyk based. New RIPS can handle RGB ICC profiles with no problems so you can send original RGB images to a RIP and it will handle all the colour conversions. > If you really want to achieve good looking portfolio prints, you will need > photoshop, a good profiled monitor and a custom profile for each printer. > Only then will you be in the ball park to predictably control and view your > images. Yep, profiling devices correctly is the key. Lee Badham Bodoni Systems Ltd - Key solutions in digital imaging. Tel: 01895 825776 Fax: 01895 825994 web: http://www.bodoni.co.uk =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
