Epson - print in RGB or CMYK?

Printing from an Apple Studio Display (Calibrated) to Epson C84 printer (until I can afford to upgrade), is there a preferred way to print, in order to more closely approximate what I see on the screen?

Frank

"Frank Potter" wrote in message

Printing from an Apple Studio Display (Calibrated) to Epson C84 printer (until I can afford to upgrade), is there a preferred way to print, in order to more closely approximate what I see on the screen?

Frank,

Short answer, use RGB. If you work in CMYK, you'll just convert back to RGB for printing anyway. CMYK will not improve the quality of your output.

Having said that, your blues normally will be untouched by the conversion. If you are concerned about this, try using the wide gamut CMYK profile. http://www.curvemeister.com/tutorials/cmyk/widegamutcmyk/wgc myk.htm

CMYK, and Lab are interesting color spaces for color correction and can get results that are otherwise unobtainable.
http://www.curvemeister.com/support/curvemeister/help/Articl es/PickADoor.htm

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Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
www.geigy.2y.net

All consumer ink jet printers are programmed to work from the RBG file format. However, in the end, the printer's output color gamut is much closer to commercial CMYK gamut than it is to SRGB or Adobe RGB. The best way to avoid a surprise is to use the CMYK preview in Photoshop to check for out-of-Gamut pixels and their nearest in-Gamut CMYK value. You have the option to use color replace where needed to see what it will look like and send a revised RBG file to the printer.

Regards, David Thompson
Olympus C8080, PS5, PS Elements2, PSP 8

"Frank Potter" wrote in message
Printing from an Apple Studio Display (Calibrated) to Epson C84 printer (until I can afford to upgrade), is there a preferred way to print, in order to more closely approximate what I see on the screen?

Frank

David Thompson wrote:

All consumer ink jet printers are programmed to work from the RBG file format. However, in the end, the printer's output color gamut is much closer to commercial CMYK gamut than it is to SRGB or Adobe RGB. The best way to avoid a surprise is to use the CMYK preview in Photoshop to check for out-of-Gamut pixels and their nearest in-Gamut CMYK value. You have the option to use color replace where needed to see what it will look like and send a revised RBG file to the printer.

I'm an advocate of using CMYK for color correction, but I have not found what David says to be the case. It is also very easy to set your printer profile as the gamut warning profile, and get a more accurate warning of any out of gamut colors. My prediction is there will be no out of gamut colors, if you work in sRGB, and almost none if you work in Adobe RGB.

The gamut of my Epson 1270 has a larger footprint than SWOP CMYK in all cases, and is somewhere between sRGB and Adobe RGB. The 1270 profile has substantially larger footprinnt than Adobe RGB for L=25% and L=75%. This translates into more color variation in shadow and highlight than. Looking at the 1200, an older model, the gamut is actually somewhat larger.

If you are interested in seeing this for themselves may experiment using the free LabMeter download from curvemeister:
http://www.curvemeister.com/tutorials/LabMeter/

If you create several views of Labmeter, you may assign each of them a different profile, then manipulate the Lightness value for a realtime comparison of all the gamuts with one another.
--

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
www.geigy.2y.net