Colour optimization: Printing black as Inkjet black on Epson 9900

[wonderings]

We have a new Epson 9900 being driven by Fiery XF. I have been playing with things here and there. I was looking at the colour optimization in the RIP. It has a few options: Clean colours, Black as inkjet black, Clean colors and black text as inked black, clean colors + black text and images as inkjet black

If I print a 100% black, it comes out somewhat muted. It is black, but not popping obviously like a rich black would. So I turned on the "black as inkjet black" and it really improved the 100%, made it look like a rich black, came out very nice. Any negatives to running this way? We go for pleasing to the eye colours, not press calibrated. Assuming this will use up more ink? Any idea of how much more ink this would use roughly?

 

[Johu]

We have a new Epson 9900 being driven by Fiery XF. I have been playing with things here and there. I was looking at the colour optimization in the RIP. It has a few options: Clean colours, Black as inkjet black, Clean colors and black text as inked black, clean colors + black text and images as inkjet black

If I print a 100% black, it comes out somewhat muted. It is black, but not popping obviously like a rich black would. So I turned on the "black as inkjet black" and it really improved the 100%, made it look like a rich black, came out very nice. Any negatives to running this way? We go for pleasing to the eye colours, not press calibrated. Assuming this will use up more ink? Any idea of how much more ink this would use roughly?

There are couple of pitfalls there. If you are trying to match a particular offset standard then most likely you will not succeed as the inkjet black is not what you have on an offset machine. To my experience Epson black in the mid tones (light black) tends to lean on a bit yellow direction.

Also if you have files where there is four color black and plain black color mixed. Like an image and a black box for example they will also never match. If you can live with those then the setting was the right cure for your problem.

 

[prepress labels]

We have a new Epson 9900 being driven by Fiery XF. I have been playing with things here and there. I was looking at the colour optimization in the RIP. It has a few options: Clean colours, Black as inkjet black, Clean colors and black text as inked black, clean colors + black text and images as inkjet black

If I print a 100% black, it comes out somewhat muted. It is black, but not popping obviously like a rich black would. So I turned on the "black as inkjet black" and it really improved the 100%, made it look like a rich black, came out very nice. Any negatives to running this way? We go for pleasing to the eye colours, not press calibrated. Assuming this will use up more ink? Any idea of how much more ink this would use roughly?

This happened maybe three years ago now, but we had to turn off that option because we were getting a stairstepping effect in some of our gradients. We had a tech come in and play around with the settings, and "Black as inkjet black" was the setting he ultimately disabled. I believe the EFI Fiery workflow was initially set up with the option checked.

Of course, we're also press-calibrated, so unchecking the option also helped us to avoid getting a deeper black on the proof than we could achieve on press.

This might not be relevant, but if you're looking to print black darker over other inks on your proofs, you'd go into Color Editor. Here's a link from EFI:

http://w3.efi.com/services/fiery-wide-format-services/~/media/Files/EFI/COM/Services/Overprint_settings_in_Color_Editor.pdf

The idea behind the overprint settings is that black looks lighter when it's printed on top of other inks as opposed to by itself (at least in some printing processes), so the RIP tries to emulate that.

 

[DYP]

"Black as inkjet black" is not useful in a proofing environment. But is signage printing environment it is great and you can add "Clean Color" to that as well. With certain printers it is a God send. For example with a Latex printer it you try to get rich blacks by added other colors to black you will get a milky black from too much ink. With "Black as inkjet black" you can lay down 100% black only, not knocked down by color management and get absolutely beautiful rich black. That is providing the file is prepared correctly with 100% black only and knocked out.

Can you get stairstepping effect in some gradients sure if you start "Black as inkjet black" somewhere in the middle of the gradients. For example in a black only gradient you could start black a 0% and print only black in the gradient, but in practice it is best to only use it for 100% black. However you can always test it to see what you can achieve with shades of black.