Hi Chris.
I just wanted to add my 2 cents/pence. Please excuse me if some of my
technical terminology is incorrect. My background is graphic design not
photography.
I have only a little experience with the "photographic" method of making
prints by exposing photographic paper but I have a done a LOT of CMYK
printing on everything from home inkjets to color lasers to printing presses
as big as my house so my info might help you.
The #1 thing to remember is that you are putting ink down on top of paper.
(This sounds obvious but sometimes people forget this when comparing CMYK
printouts to photos.) The very nature of this process creates thick areas of
ink in the dark parts and thin areas of ink in the light parts and the very
fact that there is more ink will give you a shift in reflectivity. In my
experience the best way to minimize this is to reduce the amount of ink in
the shadows to the minimum amount that still provides acceptable "darkness"
and/or cover the final print with some sort of varnish or laminate.
The #2 thing to remember is that different combinations of CMYK ink can
produce essentially the same color. As a point of reference the blackest
black that most designers use for BLACK backgrounds usually runs about 40%
Cyan, 40% Magenta, 40% Yellow and 100% Black. Black ink always prints last
the other inks are there just to build a good foundation for the black.
I downloaded your photo to my disk and converted to CMYK. The attached pics
are the head detail from the separate CMYK plates. That ink is fairly thick
on the Cyan and Black plates but it is REALLY THICK on the magenta and
yellow plates with some areas at 100%... WAY too thick in my opinion.
I think you mentioned that you don't have the full version of Photoshop so
I'm not sure that you can do this but MY fix for this is to use "levels" to
reduce the magenta and yellow from the shadows... and probably some of the
mids too.
Scanning and monitor set ups are important but if you learn how certain CMYK
values translate to into color on your printer then you can work using ONLY
the CMYK values and essentially ignore what you see on screen. A well
calibrated mind will outperform a well calibrated monitor every time.
Good luck and happy photoshopping.
- Matt Crawley
imagopus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> I used the photo at
> http://www.threeshoes.co.uk/comment/Photo_Comment.html
SNIP
> Thanks
>
> Chris
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