SwissQ Impala 4 - Caldera - Color Management

[ButlerSignCo]

Greetings Print People!

Background Info: I've been digitally printing for the same company for the last 12 years. We've always just accepted the defaults profiles on printers and made adjustments in Illustrator. After being sent to Chicago for training with people that understood color my curiosity peaked as I found there was sooo much I didn't know and felt the NEED to know. Since then I've been trying to learn and make better practices in my day to day printing.

We acquired an SwissQ Impala 4 and I made my company get an i1 Pro3 for help me profile materials for better color consistency. After doing the iPrism calibration (1700 swatches) and setting ink limits I still find myself wondering if anyone else has lack of vibrancy issues.

Should my Conversion from Input Space to Lab be set to the profile I made?

My company is trying to push really hard for me to match Pantones and be within a 2.5-3 Delta variant range.

How often is the called out Delta difference actually accurate?

Just trying to understand. Anything helps and any criticism is taken constructively.

 

[dypinc]

Once you get the basics down which you seem on the way to doing, then do some experimenting with ink limits to see how little ink limits you can get away with. Also experiment with the other settings especially the rendering intents to see which give you better results. Once you do that then you can always create color books to see if you can improve the CMYK output values by creating your own CMYK library.

Your input profile should match the profile of the file your trying to print but doesn't really have any influence for spot colors as they should be getting their LAB values from the library (unless the spot color is not found) to convert using the ICC media profile to the actual CMYK output values.

I am not a big fan of Caldera's linearization because when setting preserve pure colors it does not allow 100% output values to go to the printer if the 100% output values in the linearization file is not 100%. I have had a discussion with Caldera about that. It can be a problem if you would like to have good black by printing using Preserve Pure Black for example. So be careful with that if your Pantone colors really would benefit from having 100% Magenta to get better reds. I have experimented with their linearization file and edited numbers for the 100% values to 100% without any ill effects that I could tell.

 

[Pauly]

I am not a big fan of Caldera's linearization because when setting preserve pure colors it does not allow 100% output values to go to the printer if the 100% output values in the linearization file is not 100%. I have had a discussion with Caldera about that. It can be a problem if you would like to have good black by printing using Preserve Pure Black for example. So be careful with that if your Pantone colors really would benefit from having 100% Magenta to get better reds. I have experimented with their linearization file and edited numbers for the 100% values to 100% without any ill effects that I could tell.

Their linearisation and ink limits are done together. A lot of the time you dont need to have 100% of anything as you're most likely have reached max chroma before that. If max chroma is 85%, then anything more is just laying down more ink for no reason.
The only time you'll see 100% is if the printer is printing at higher speeds and is having a hard time laying down ink

 

[dypinc]

Their linearisation and ink limits are done together. A lot of the time you dont need to have 100% of anything as you're most likely have reached max chroma before that. If max chroma is 85%, then anything more is just laying down more ink for no reason.
The only time you'll see 100% is if the printer is printing at higher speeds and is having a hard time laying down ink

That is what linearization and ink limits are for but if I want pure primaries then I want them at 100% especially with latex inks which give the best blacks at 100% black only. The Pure Primary selection should override the Linearization file setting for 100%.

 

[Pauly]

That is what linearization and ink limits are for but if I want pure primaries then I want them at 100% especially with latex inks which give the best blacks at 100% black only. The Pure Primary selection should override the Linearization file setting for 100%.

I don't agree in how you think it should work as it makes 0 sense.

Once you've reached max chroma, wether it's 90% limit or even 100% do your latex black, that's the website limit of the ink on the printer.

If 90% is max chroma for magenta for example, printing at 100% ink is literally worse than printing at 90%

If your ink chroma looks like this,
Printing anything over the maximum chroma is actually going backwards.


Ink % in - chroma value
80% - 85
85% - 94
90% - 100
95% - 97
100% - 94

And besides, if using a solvent etc where too much ink is also causing bleed and artefacts... Having it you way will just create a hand full of problems.

If you think your way is correct, then set all ink limits to 100% and profile it at 100%.

 

[dypinc]

If you think your way is correct, then set all ink limits to 100% and profile it at 100%.

I only want (when I select that for most case being Vector elements) Prue Primaries to print at 100%. If I don't select Pure Primaries I want to use the linearization and ink limits for 100% values in the input file. I am pretty sure that when I used the ColorGate RIP that is how it worked. Specific to the Latex printers, Black at 100% looks the best and 90% doesn't get it which may be fine for other ink types of printers.