Onyx Thrive 11 & Epson GS6000 ICC Patch Bleed & Ink Framing

[MDKAOD]

Hey all, I've been struggling with this for a while now and it's become frustrating, but I'm sure it's something I'm doing wrong.

I'm trying to profile several General Formulation vinyls and their spec sheets don't have any recommended specs for total ink limits of the vinyl so I'm sort of shooting in the dark here. When I run through Onyx's ink restrictions, I get a good result patch, then I run the calibration swatch which also looks good, but then I run advanced charts, G7 for example which gives me picture framing on the patches. If I continue with the process, the ink limit swatch is a mess. Bleeds everywhere...oh God, bleeds everywhere!

So I back track and artificially restrict my inks back at step one, and after much, much trial and error I eventually hit something that is workable.

My question is, is there a better way to do this without so much wasted time and material? There has to be something I'm missing here.

Thanks for any insight.

 

[Hotspur]

Onyx Ink Restrictions

OK use the automatic ink restrictions and select a mid-level gamut to aim for (coated or similar - not maximum) as your media sounds as if it can't take too much ink.

Once you have read the ink restriction go to the black diamond and have a look at the results.

You should see the curves for light and dark inks on Cyan, Magenta etc - here is where over-inking of light ink can be controlled.

Most issues with too much ink is due to too much light ink. Light ink is only there to give smoothness in the really light tones but most rips pour far too much down by default.

Using the advanced controls you can reduce the amount of light ink down to about 10-15% - it should only be a small amount at the left hand side of the graph where the lightest areas are concerned - any more than this and you are not increasing smoothness, nor gamut - just liquid which gives you problems later on.

Using this technique you can maybe select a bigger initial gamut but by reducing the light inks still manage to keep the total ink low enough to work - try it and see.

Then run a standard linearization calibration - don't change anything - and then move straight to the ink limit (avoiding any advanced charts, G7 etc unless you have a special reason to)

For ink limits you are going from small ink amounts to maximum possible ink (within your ink restrictions of course) so expect bleeding here as that's what you need to use to make an assessment of where to call off the ink limits.

Using Advanced ink limits, If you are seeing bleeding beyond 200% for ABC and 270% for DEF this is normal and you can go ahead and make your assessment using the advice found here:

http://onyxtalk.com/thread-understanding-ink-limits

If you have alot of bleeding below these levels then either you made a bad job of your ink restrictions and need to redo them using a lower gamut choice - if you are confident ink restrictions are OK then you have a media that may simply be incompatible.

Good luck!

 

[MDKAOD]

Looks like I was on the right track. I started with the uncoated media selection, but didn't go much further with it and never though to limit just the light inks, instead I limited everything, so your advice helps a lot. I've never seen a vinyl take so little ink, but I've never been very diverse with my product line. Thank you.

 

[Bly]

It sounds like you're getting stuck on the only step that needs human intervention, the advanced ink limit swatch.
This limits the amount of combined inks, so just look along at where the combos start to bleed and that's your limit.
For A and B it's usually around 190 on my Roland, and 200 ish for C.
Look at the "bleed" boxes in the bottom rhs and see what setting has an acceptable result and adjust the B 1 2 or 3 settings.
Likewise the row along the bottom - see which colours give you trouble and it shows which setting to adjust.
Everything else should be fine once you have this sorted, assuming you have no bleeding on the restriction and linearisation swatches.