Re: RGB vs CMYK: gamut and some important notes for CMYK users

Katharine Thayer wrote:
>
> Here's the way I look at it:
> in printing separations, we don't need to worry about gamut because the
> separations are in greyscale. So theoretically we can make separations
> that could make all the colors in the RGB gamut if we had pigments that
> could combine to create those colors.

On reflection, I think that sentence is probably wrong, but I'm too
tired to think what the right thing would be. I'm not sure how many
colors there are in the RGB gamut. The number of colors that separations
could print, if there were pigments to print them, would theoretically
be 100 cubed, but I don't know if inkjet prints on transparency, or on
paper for that matter, can produce 100 different densities? Mark? It
seems unlikely to me at the moment. If not, it would be whatever that
maximum number of different tones a printer can produce, cubed, that
would give you the number of colors that separations could theoretically
produce. Whether that would be more or less than the colors in the gamut
of a particular set of pigments is a rather unanswerable question, and I
guess that's why I'd prefer to let the pigments decide whether they can
print the colors or not, since there isn't a profile available for the
pigment sets that one could use to determine which values should be
clipped as out of gamut. Does that make sense? I hope so, goodnight.
kt
Received on Sun Dec 5 03:51:09 2004