quad issues

[tboley@emeraldnet.net]

I've seen a few posts about "struggles" with quads. Though I am still
tweaking here are a few things I've learned after MUCH testing. If you
have made any effort to assign the different inks to their appropriate
portions of the tonal scale you must make sure you are not printing
through a profile, or any space other than RGB color (driver) or CMYK
color (rip). The software thinks you are in color, the profiles
"correct" that color and by doing so puts ink you don't want in tonal
areas you don't want it. Took me forever to find this seemingly obvious
flaw in my procedure.
On Concorde ink levels must not get too high. I've had best results by
limiting individual channel output levels to well under 100% with all
but the 100% black ink. Dan Culbertson says he has not found this
necessary but our methods may differ in other ways and this has been the
only way I have gotten good results on Concorde. Lysonic paper doesn't
have problems with lots of ink, Sommerset I haven't been able to get
anything on, unless you like the look of ink splattered on Charmin. The
only other papers I've tried are Liege, a bit irrelevant for quads, and
a beta paper , both of which also needed levels limited a bit.
If printing with StylusRIP you must watch the total ink as well, go over
200% much and the RIP will take over and substitute black in those
areas. Dan has mentioned this many times but I had to learn the hard
way. As his methods suggest, the channel mixer is invaluable for
controlling total ink. Yeah I know, when PressReady comes out we will
all experience Nirvana. With Dan's RGB method printing with the driver
(it work's!) I'm not sure what total ink limit needs to be. But the
driver is substituting K for dark RGB values at some point, so it's
still an issue.
There are ways around all these problems, and I've seen some pretty bad
quad advice. I'd bet I'm not the only one trying to optimize this
process and would be very interested in other's trials and methods.
Tyler
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