articles/Printers/epsongamutboost-page3
by Mike McNamee Published 01/10/2008
Image 1. A series of pigment swatches painted onto watercolour paper and then scanned on a calibrated Epson 10000 GL. The file is then imaged in Photoshop and the Gamut Warning turned on while the proof gamut is set to the target profile. The greyed out areas represent pixels that are out of gamut. The orange is very much out of gamut on sRGB indicating that this would be a poor profile for camera copying of artwork. It highlights the potential benefit of RAW camera capture followed by output into a higher volume workspace such as Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB.
Image 2.A testing set of orange tones soft proofed with the profiles annotated in the top corners of the screen grabs. With the 7900 there is just a small number of pixels flagged at area marked 'A'. Note that none of the greens is out of gamut, indeed we could not find any in our trials
Image 3. The intense reds of Linda McCann's amaryllis show a similar trend to the test of the swatches.
Data extracted from the profile-building file shows (in 2-D only) the position of the colour values from the Epson 4800. Superimposed is the single, out-of-gamut tone of the orange from the flowers above at 'A'. Although the improvement with the 7900 printer is impressive we are still talking about quite small shifts, such is the starting quality of the UltraChrome ink set.
Amaryllis
This is a scan from Linda McCann's lovely study of amaryllis. Once again the 9600 out-performs both sRGB and the 3800 on the same surface.
Orange Flowers
We took this image from Andrew Williams because it displays intense oranges. The original was an Adobe RGB file and so the right-hand variant of the composite shows everything in gamut for that colour space. The sRGB is well out of gamut, the 3800 just so (on the higher gamut Premium Glossy Photo Paper). The 7900 nearly made it, with just a few pixels showing as out of gamut on the Traditional Photo Paper profile.
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