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Profiling in Onyx

artifacture

New Member
After successfully setting up a profile on paper, I set out to do a profile for clear acrylic. I was advised to use material as thin as possible and the thinnest acrylic is 0.06" thick, so I'm using some thin 0.02" acetate film from a project.

Per the video on setting up spot colors, I wanted to start with the specialty ink restriction chart. That option was grayed out when I had OEM dither pattern selected, but enabled it for stochastic. The video explained that it starts with 10-100% white so you can determine if there is a point where extra ink doesn't make a difference, in which case you can use less ink. But you also have to check it against its ability to cover the CMYK inks. That's what we see on the back side (next image). Unfortunately, even at 100%, you can see ink through it. When that's important, we've been printing 2 layers of white. It would be nice to be able to have the ability to specify that here. At that point, it probably doesn't need to be 2 layers of 100%, maybe 70% or something? In one of the earlier settings, it mentions layers, but if that's what it adjusts, I imagine it would affect CMYK as well.

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I've been using Densitometric measurements to assess the ink limits because it increases until a point where the delta values hits 0 or negative values across the board. So I step back one level. The luminosity value of LCH measurement works, but the values become more and more negative, contrary to what I read, but at some point it will pop above zero and one level down is what I go with.

Reading through the clear side with white overprint, something was definitely off. D had a distinct black circle in the middle. I was getting the propellers that indicate something is off in the ink limit settings (or maybe an earlier ink restriction measurements.) Increasing the E value reduced the radius of the propeller there, but didn't get rid of it. I tried increasing some of the limits as that worked with the paper, but it didn't here. I wasn't sure if it was light or dark propellers so I tried reducing the limits some. That got me to here, but E is just muddy, and D's black ring improved, but is still there.

So I gave up and switched to white underprint. I used density measurement as usual, but tried the Luminosity option as well. It was slightly different, but the color wheels looked great (second set)

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artifacture

New Member
Continuing on the white underprint version, when I got to the ICC swatches, it offered me CMYK+spot options. I was going to select a regular one because I can't measure white ink swatches on clear. But at the bottom of the window it said that I had to select an option with a spot color in order to back print the white. So I did.

It looks normal at first, but the back side shows many of the swatches as translucent. If held to the light, it's definitely more translucent than the other swatch prints leading up to this step. If I lay the film over on itself, I can see swatches and the gaps between them through one of the translucent swatches. So I don't see how I can measure these with any accuracy, since the surface they're on will influence it. Did I select the wrong option? Spot1 underprint has worked on every other step prior to this.

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