Vivid colors vs Neutral grays...

[IIDave]

Profiling -- yeeaaaargh!
When I started at this shop profiling was unheard of... I have been trying to make a dent in improving our color quality and consistency, and want to poke my eyes out...

The standard here is to print with the default media profiles that come with the RIP -- they yeild an OK print, but can put down too much ink in some cases and photographs as part of graphics can be awful... and grayscale -- when I won't go there. So I have been working on making my own color and media profiles.

So far things have gone OK, it can be a steep learning curve with the ink restrictions and ink limits... but I seem to have gotten to a pretty decent place. Or at least I thought I had...

If I have a print that includes people, a photograph, or grayscale -- my profile is great. If I to print something with more vivid colors (vector art, logos, etc...) My profile is much more muted. I have been printing with the default "HP Premium Self Adhesive Vinyl" profile (for example) still for most things, just because it hits all of my pantones much more closely.

Do people generally have two profiles they use for a given media? One that is tweaked to give you more saturation at the expense of good gradients and gray scales, and one that will give you better quality photographic prints? Is there a way to get both?

[jonkovach]

I, personally, have never done that, but I'd like to see if anyone else has. I wonder if there are downsides to this?

[bigbly]

Just turn ICC profiles off and you'll have vivid vectors.

[Hotspur]

There should be no need for this in theory.

A good profile will maximise gamut AND produce accurate greyscales (assuming you want maximum gamut - you may want to match the gamut of another device, for example, but greyscales should always be accurate)

Anything else is a poor (or wrong) profile.

If you were to produce a max gamut profile there is no reason why it should be less neutral - and vice-versa.

Often a poor restricted-gamut profile appears more neutral because the problem in the profile that gives you a colour cast is minimised by the lack of saturation - the problem is there, just hidden.

What you may be describing is the effect you see when applying an input profile to a CMYK Vector.

This will help accuracy but at the expense of saturation - this doesn't apply to bitmaps in the same way as you have seen with tiffs & jpegs etc.

Thus by turning off your input profile for the CMYK vector element you will find your original CMYK values are maintained and will be more saturated - all with the same paper profile.

This used to be called "Postercolour" and is how many printshops, who produce eye-catching posters without any great need for accuracy, operate their rips. i.e. turn on the input profiles for images (bitmaps) and turn them off for vectors, on the same file using the quickset settings.

It's a popular setup as long as you understand the risks of seeing colour differences where the same colour in both the vector and bitmap elements of a file look different due to the different input profile settings, and of course the reduction in accuracy on all the CMYK vector elements.

If you have Onyx Prep Edge Pro you can give each different CMYK element in a single file it's own input profile (or no profile) so you can select which vectors have high saturation and which have accurate colour, rather than the global settings as used in the Onyx rip - this really does give you absolute colour control.