wide-gamut printing

[KenC]

What services are available commercially for printing images having colors outside the gamut of a typical photo printer? I have some images with large areas that are way outside the gamut of my Epson 2400, and which even have some areas outside of Adobe RGB (1998).

 

[Helen B]

Could you post links to the images (or small versions of them) so we can look at the 3-D gamut maps and compare them to those of various printers.

Thanks,
Helen

 

[KenC]

Could you post links to the images (or small versions of them) so we can look at the 3-D gamut maps and compare them to those of various printers.

Thanks,
Helen

I don't have PS here at work, but I'm sure the images I posted recently in the thread linked below, especially the first, would be beyond the Epson 2400 gamut.

http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/general-gallery/249380-illuminated-leaves.html

Thanks for helping out!

 

[Garbz]

In the red direction? Good luck.

Lots of wide gamut printers show improvements in the direction of green, yellow and blue, but not too much in the red.

As for services, many decent labs will have some chemical process printer on nice paper that can achieve large gamuts. I've found several in my sorry excuse for a big city so I'm sure you'll find plenty in Philadelphia. Best open the yellow pages and call a few of them.

 

[KenC]

Thanks, Garbz. I'll try that. Disappointing about the red - for some reason a lot of my out-of-gamut colors are in the red/orange direction.

 

[Helen B]

As Garbz says, you'll have problems getting better reds than the 2400 can produce - it's actually one of the better printers when it comes to reds. Even the Canon Pro9500, which has red ink, doesn't do much better (in fact it doesn't do as well as the 2400 with the brighter reds). Printing on light-sensitive paper with a Lightjet or similar will be even worse. The following graph assumes that your images use sRGB (of course they could be in an even larger space, and hence even more out of gamut). This is a slice through the image gamut (the second image you posted, values shown as dots), the gamut of an R2400 with glossy paper and the gamut of Fuji glossy paper printed on a LightJet, all at L=60. The outer extents of the print gamuts for all values of L are also shown - the R2400 is the outside line for most hues.

If you really want to pursue this you could ask someone like Lenny Eiger who has a 12-color Roland d'Vinci printer, I think. I don't have a profile for that, so I can't say exactly how much better it will be than a 2400, but it will be about as good as you can get (and it won't be cheap).

 

[Garbz]

Hey Helen what software do you use to compare profiles? The one I have somewhere is slow and is outright crap from a usability point of view.

 

[Helen B]

Garbz,

I use ColorThink Pro. It does a lot more than compare profiles, of course.

Best,
Helen

 

[Garbz]

Indeed, Thanks I'll have a look into it.

 

[KenC]

As Garbz says, you'll have problems getting better reds than the 2400 can produce - it's actually one of the better printers when it comes to reds. Even the Canon Pro9500, which has red ink, doesn't do much better (in fact it doesn't do as well as the 2400 with the brighter reds). Printing on light-sensitive paper with a Lightjet or similar will be even worse. The following graph assumes that your images use sRGB (of course they could be in an even larger space, and hence even more out of gamut). This is a slice through the image gamut (the second image you posted, values shown as dots), the gamut of an R2400 with glossy paper and the gamut of Fuji glossy paper printed on a LightJet, all at L=60. The outer extents of the print gamuts for all values of L are also shown - the R2400 is the outside line for most hues.

If you really want to pursue this you could ask someone like Lenny Eiger who has a 12-color Roland d'Vinci printer, I think. I don't have a profile for that, so I can't say exactly how much better it will be than a 2400, but it will be about as good as you can get (and it won't be cheap).

Thanks, Helen. Encouraging anyway to know that the 2400 does pretty well. Of course I print almost everything on matte paper, so perhaps I'm losing a little there. I'll have to ask around some of the digital printing shops here and see what they say.