The Vivid Setting
The Vivid Setting
- Subject: The Vivid Setting
- From: email@hidden
- Date: Sun, 30 Jun 2002 18:31:54 -0700
Bob, Andrew,
Unfortunately the Vivid setting is useless as a general solution,
although it might seem great at first without careful inspection, or
if your image doesn't happen to contain any near-neutral colors.
If you print out a target with it such as the LCH leaves target from
Candela, you will see that Vivid has a vicious stripe right up the
middle where the very near neutral colors are one lightness, and all
surrounding colors are much lighter. An extreme discontinuity in the
color space which was deliberately introduced to change the way
simple graphics print, and which cannot be removed by any profiling
method, short of reading many tens of thousands of patches.
It's true that the gamut of Vivid is nearly as great as that of NCA,
in great contrast to the Photo Realistic setting, which is modelled
around the idea of getting a printer to emulate a Trinitron without
using ICC profiles and results in a gamut shaped like that of a
Trinitron (many darker, saturated colors gone).
The Automatic setting merely chooses automatically between Vivid and
Photo Realistic, supposedly, based on some kind of quick and simple
analysis of image content, so that graphics go to Vivid, and photos
go to Photo Realistic (automatically).
Although I haven't done the tests myself to prove it, the Photo
Enhance4 setting is built around a much fuller image content analysis
and therefore is completely useless for printing with profiles too
(even worse than Vivid), although it may be great for printing
snapshots without profiles, which is what it was intended for. So
forget high-end user control with Photo Enhance4 too. Too bad,
because it can print a very impressive, albeit cool, gray gradient.
So if you want the full gamut, there's still no choice except NCA,
with its typically bad to awful non-linearity. I have managed to get
an excellent profile for Premium Luster for the 9600/7600 despite the
extreme non-linearity, which is tricky, to say the least. The best
hope is for a better choice in the driver that gives the full gamut,
is repeatable, and is reasonably linear without any severe
crossovers, or else to get direct, low-level control over the tables
in the driver (v. complicated to use), or both.
Joe Holmes
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