George Battrick wrote:
Is anyone from Hewlett Packard here? It seems to me
that their strategy
is that CMYK (or Hexachrome, or an extra
grey or pale cyan or whatever) should all be internal
matters to be
taken care of inside the printing machine, and >that all printing
equipment, from the desktop printer to the Indigo and who knows how much
further, should receive >RGB data. In this case, the user need know
scarcely anything at all.
I am not so sure that comparing the technology involved to enhance
inkjet prints is the best example to use for an RGB offset workflow, but
it is interesting that you mention HP. They are one of the few inkjet
manufacturers that take in CMYK data as compared to Epson (RGB), for
example. Example. - Designjet 755, 2500, 5500. And, if I recall
correctly (it has been some time since I have looked), even if you take
an HP10 with the bundled RIP to which you can send RGB or CMYK data, the
default RGB profile does not match the default RGB profile of Photoshop.
Also, HP advocates sRGB and neither ECI-RGB nor Adobe RGB (1998), which
is not a particularly optimal working space for offset. Of course it is
much easier to simply hand-off RGB data and hope that everything comes
out great (no clipping, no loss of gammut, no banding), but the problem
is that invariably people start to ask questions when their beautiful
blues come out flat.
Regards.
Darrian Young