Roger, On Feb 26, 2015, at 10:59 AM, Roger Breton wrote:

I had a client, recently, who asked me to "calibrate" his new large format inkjet printer. What was I going to put in as the Source "default" in his Onyx RIP, SWOPv2? You think clients who send their jobs to this service bureau are going to be happy to get the crummy gamut of SWOPv2 on their output? You think my client would have had praise for my services if that's what I did for him?

You tell me.

Okay... Thing is, with the input default set up as SWOP2 in Onyx, the only way they'd get SWOP back is if they sent him SWOP to begin with. And in Onyx, as in every other large-format RIP, there's a check-box on the same dialogue where you set default incoming spaces to honor embedded profile. So that way if the file happens to be some other CMYK than SWOP, then the RIP will ignore the default and honor the embedded profile anyway. However, the point here is that if the client sends SWOP, then SWOP is what they reasonably ought to expect to get back. And with large format printing, the issue isn't that they ought to use some marginally larger CMYK space, such as Gracol -- which while, granted, has a somewhat larger gamut than SWOP, is still dwarfed by most large format printers printing on most large format media -- the issue is that they shouldn't be using CMYK at all. And my experience over many years doing this is that is just never happens. If large format printers get CMYK files, they're invariably SWOP. The client just started working in CMYK in Illustrator, or Corel Draw, or Photoshop, and more than likely doesn't even know where the color settings dialogue is, or what it does. In that case, there isn't anything that can be done to get whatever color information was stripped out of the file when it was converted to CMYK. All that can be done is to have a well-profiled machine reproduce the file accurately. Which means not arbitrarily assigning an incorrect color space to it at RIP time simply because you don't like one particular color space. Mike