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Profiling: How to determine ink levels?

Lars

Active member
Hi,
I am trying some third party ink and random papers, obviously all bets are off re color so profiling is mandatory.

What is a good methodology to determine the right level of ink for a paper? I would imagine that perhaps printing a ramp or fully saturated CMYK could be useful perhaps?

BTW the control I have in the Epson driver is ink level for all inks, not per color.

Any input appreciated,
Lars
 

pfigen

Member
The only controls you have when printing through the Epson driver are Media Type and Ink Load. Printing CMYK ramps are useless as the Epson driver treats your printer as an RGB device and will convert your CMYK back to RGB then back to CMYK++ on the fly. If you were using a true CMYK RIP then you could print CMYK step ramps of pure color and measure those steps with a spectrophotometer while reading where the a and b values hit max saturation.

Probably the best thing to do in your case is devise an RGB test file that has both luminance and color steps that are labeled with their values, then print that using all the different media type settings. There will be one that appears closest to being right. Then you can alter the ink load settings in the driver for a further tweak if necessary. Make sure you do all this test printing through the Adobe Color Printer Utility so you're avoiding using any color management in your testing and subsequent target printing.
 

scho

Well-known member
Hi,
I am trying some third party ink and random papers, obviously all bets are off re color so profiling is mandatory.

What is a good methodology to determine the right level of ink for a paper? I would imagine that perhaps printing a ramp or fully saturated CMYK could be useful perhaps?

BTW the control I have in the Epson driver is ink level for all inks, not per color.

Any input appreciated,
Lars
If you have QuadToneRIP, then you could print 21 step ramps for each color ink channel and then use a spectrophotometer to find the saturation point (max density).
 
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