Okay.. every color you print is a build of certain percentages of cyan, magenta, yellow and black, black is called K to avoid confusion (it means Key color). Pure K will usually never be dense enough to make a good black, and 100 percent of CMY will give you a muddy brown black. In process print the K color helps to make images pop.
Wet black is a color built in CMYK (vs RGB or Pantone). You call out the exact percentages of each channel in the mix in your design program. Your rip will usually process that straight thru, limited only by linearization and ink limits. So my wet black, which is common to litho printing is 40 percent of each primary.. cyan, yellow, magenta, plus 100 percent K. All total we're using 220 percent ink coverage. This fills the black color in artwork with extra ink to correct the lack of ink density that a single channel k has. It makes your black "pop".
Now for ink limits and Linearization.. ink limits are the ability of each vinyl to accept ink. Your printer can squirt a LOT of ink. Usually more than you need. But at some point it won't dry, it'll get runny and messy and you'll waste ink money.
Your rip has a process to save ink for each media while still getting good color. When you ink limit, you're telling the program that it should reduce the amount of ink squirted at a certain percentage point. Let's just say your media can't take more than 50 percent of magenta at default operating levels. You'll tell your rip that 50% should now be converted to become the 100% point. So your rip will adjust the print driver to make the maximum ink squirted be 50% of the machines actual capability. Now your maximum deposition for that channel is 50%, and the math is changed in the rip so it sees that as 100% for that media.
Now we have to tell the rip where each of the percentage points between 0-100 is since we changed the top limit. Otherwise our mid colors will be yecch.
Linearization is the calibration of the steps from 0 (bare paper) to 100 percent ink coverage in each channel (CMYK). Usually this is done with a step wedge target and a device that reads the steps, either in density, or in color space. Correct Color is a merchant here and sells and supports that stuff if you don't have it.
This process calibrates the machine to use the least but best amount of ink, and to properly make a 0-100 range of colors based on each media.
I've seen shops save thousands of dollars a year in ink and have much happier clients from this. It's important.
Think of it like this, you have a garden hose nozzle that can squirt a range of water from mist to stream, ink limits are like turning the house tap down for less flow pressure, but the handle nozzle still gives you a mist to stream.. it'll fill a bucket slower as you're not moving as much water..
Hope that helps. Hard to be very explanatory on a smartphone..
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