elliott-brennan wrote:
I've never been shown the difference (as in, "here are examples of a photograph") and I don't know if most (the majority of) people would notice or care either way.
The difference is mainly apparent when using shades around black. That's a part of the printer's palette (ie, CMYK) where RGB lacks sufficient resolution to describe all that the printer can do. Getting silver shades is particularly hard in RGB. Also lacking in GIMP and Inkscape is support for spot printing and multi-colour processes. PANTONE is the most common of those process -- it is commonly used to print logos onto things. In short, you wouldn't notice with photos, but if you're trying for a moderate level of graphics arts on paper then the lack of ability to describe all that the printer is capable of gets old pretty quickly. As a simple example, I had to ditch GIMP to get a "sun rising" effect on some PR material I was preparing. Similarly, the lack of PANTONE support sucks if you are printing stuff like your sporting club's logo onto water bottles or whatever. I got particularly burned by Inkscape having an error in the image flattening -- the image had white over a gray spot, but this didn't flatten into a hole in the gray spot, leading to Tasmania being dropped. -- Glen Turner -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
