Process inks — where it appears
Named by 39 essays across 6 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.
A halftone is not a mixture
Forty per cent cyan and thirty per cent magenta are not stirred together anywhere. They are laid down as dots, and the sheet is a mosaic of four fully-inked regions in proportions the two coverages fix — which is why the colour is an area average of four spectra rather than a blend of two, and why it lands nowhere near where mixing would put it.
A dot is larger than it was asked to be
Two quite different things make a printed midtone darker than its coverage says — ink spreading under pressure, and light scattering sideways inside the paper. Both bend the tone curve the same way and neither touches its ends, so the measurement every press is characterised by cannot say which happened. A patch that nobody measures can.
Neither gamut contains the other
Converting a picture to CMYK is described everywhere as a reduction, as though the press were a smaller version of the screen. Measured as solids, the press reaches eleven per cent of its volume outside sRGB while sRGB reaches fifty-four per cent of its volume outside the press — and in the cyans the press wins by seventy per cent of chroma.
The fourth ink is not for colour
Black is in every process set and it extends the gamut by more than a third — and at every lightness above about forty it extends the chroma boundary by exactly nothing. What it buys is depth at the bottom, a neutral that holds its hue when the press drifts, and a way to put a full-strength dark on a sheet that could not carry three inks' worth of it.
A brand colour is an ink
A named colour is a jar of pigment with a spectrum, and a four-colour build of it is three inks arranged to integrate to the same three numbers. Of 156 constructed single-pigment inks, 15 can be matched at all — and those fifteen drift by a median of 3.8 colour differences under a tungsten lamp, because the match was never a match.
The fifth ink buys a corner
Orange, green and violet are sold as the answer to a four-colour press's gamut, and each one adds seven to nine per cent of volume. All three together add 23 per cent — almost exactly the sum, with no interaction — and every bit of it lands in the region of the ink that was added, at lightnesses where that ink is dark.
A pattern has a direction
Every spatial claim here is a claim about a frequency, and a frequency has no direction in it. Turning a printed screen forty-five degrees makes it exactly twice as quiet with nothing else changed — and the same rotation does nothing at all to a chromatic one.
A tint at the edge of a page
The last phase left this join open and guessed at its answer — how visible a halftone tint is away from the centre of gaze should be the product of two effects it had measured separately. It is not the product. At five degrees the guess is fifty-three times too generous, and by twenty it is out by eight orders of magnitude.
A halftone is a luminance object
The eye's three spatial channels resolve a screen at 55, 15 and 10 cycles per degree, so at any ruling a press actually runs only one of them can see it at all. The corollary corrects a guess already published here — rotating a screen matters more to the chromatic channels, not less — but only at rulings so coarse that nobody prints there.
Measured with an aperture, seen with an eye
A spectrophotometer averages a halftone patch and reports one reflectance. An eye blurs it first and compresses afterwards, and the average of a concave function is below the function of the average — so a resolvable screen looks darker than it measures, by fourteen lightness units at a coarse ruling and by nothing at a fine one. The correction a press applies is the same size and has no viewing distance in it.
Dividing by the paper
Media-relative colorimetry divides tristimulus values by the substrate's, which is a von Kries adaptation applied in XYZ — the one basis the table here describes as the oldest mistake still shipping. On a paper-mill white it costs a few hundredths of a unit. On a tinted sheet it costs ten times what the same rule costs in a cone basis.
Only one of these devices adapts
An eye, a camera, a display and a press all meet the same changes of light, and each has at most one thing it can do about them. The press has nothing at all, so its column is the whole change; and this collection's sensor built to satisfy the Luther condition exactly is the one that adapts worst.
A profile is a fit between its nodes
A printer profile is a table, exact at every patch that was printed and interpolated everywhere else — and everywhere else is where every job lives. Going from a hundred and thirty-five patches to three and a half thousand is twenty-seven times the work for eight times the accuracy, and the exponents say that is as good as it gets.
A brand colour for a population
A brand colour is chosen once, specified in a number, and seen by everybody. The observer audit says two candidate colours with identical specifications can carry observer spreads differing by an order of magnitude, and that the spread is computable from an ink's spectrum at the moment the ink is chosen.
A profile interpolates light
A profile is exact at its patches and wrong between them, and how wrong has been measured twice. Which way it is wrong has not. At a nine-step lattice the mean signed lightness error between the nodes is +0.136 against a mean colour difference of 0.133 — the error is not a scatter but a bias, and it lightens. The repair costs nothing measured and is forbidden by how a profile is checked: let the table be wrong at its own patches.
The inverse table errs dark
A profile's forward table predicts a print lighter than the press makes, and refitting its nodes removes the bias. The table a colour engine actually uses to separate an image is the other one — the inverse, from colour to ink — and it errs the opposite way: filled exactly from the press it asks for too much ink and prints dark, and built by inverting the ordinary forward table it prints darker still. Inverting the refitted forward table removes the inherited part and leaves the inverse's own. The round trip through both tables improves only when each is refitted against its own error, and then the two are no longer each other's inverse.
A projection has no reason to detour
Holding a gradient inside a press by penalising the excursion turned the gamut's price from a number into a search: on five of ten crossing gradients some starting point leaves the relaxation trapped at more than twice the free length, and the spread across six starts runs to 271 per cent of the free path. Replacing the penalty with a projection — take the free step, then move each point to the nearest printable colour — leaves no trap on any gradient and a spread of 0.06 to 2.4 per cent.
A strategy keeps the refit only where black prints
Refitting an inverse table's nodes against their own error halves it, and in a four-ink table the refit has to leave the separation strategy's choice of black alone. Held to the strategy, it keeps the whole of its gain wherever the strategy prints black and almost none of it where the strategy does not — and the share it keeps equals the share of the grey ramp printed with black, to within three hundredths. The start of black generation, predicted to be where the refit would fail, is where the table needs it least.
A margin costs a press its corners
A gradient held inside a coated press by projection was predicted to tear if the press were first shrunk by a safety margin, at any pinch narrow enough for the shrinking to cut. The press has no such pinch: shrunk by any margin up to thirty CIELAB units it stays in one piece, and projected routes on it are neither trapped nor torn. What a margin costs is concentrated at the corners — the solid yellow moves nearly four times the margin to get inside, like the tip of a 31-degree spike.
A reader sees the reversal until almost adapted
An orange halftone tint on newsprint turns its hue one way and the same tint on coated paper turns it the other, and the reversal is the newsprint's yellow. An instrument sees it in full; a reader fully adapted to the paper does not see it at all. A real reader is somewhere between, adapted to a mixture of the paper and whatever surrounds it. Half-adapted, the reader still sees more than half of the instrument's turn, and the reversal lasts until the reader is adapted nine-tenths or more of the way to the paper. On a paler uncoated sheet it is gone by just past half-way. A coated sheet does not care.
A little black ends the cast
A four-ink inverse table errs by a warm cast along the grey axis wherever the separation strategy prints only three inks, and almost only in lightness wherever it prints black. Real strategies start black gently, and the gentle start was expected to keep the cast until black carried much of the grey. It does not. The cast falls to a tenth of its three-ink size once black supplies a tenth to a sixth of the grey's darkening, at every toe from nothing to thirty units wide — because inside the toe the table's chord runs along the trade of black against the other three inks, which errs in lightness. What the toe does cost is the segment where black begins, which goes from the table's best to its worst.
A tolerance's own unit rounds the corners
Shrinking a coated press by a margin in CIELAB units made its corners pay several times the margin — the solid yellow nearly four. A print buyer states a margin in ΔE₀₀, and in that unit the corners pay about half as much: six of nine saturated end colours move within a third of the margin, and only the solid yellow is still sharper than a cube's corner. The prediction that the dark corners would stay sharp was wrong; they round too. What the tolerance's unit costs instead is volume — two ΔE₀₀ keep two thirds of the press where two CIELAB units kept four fifths.
The cast returns where black is steep
Below a black-generation toe a four-ink table's grey picks up a small cast again, up to a third of the three-ink cast at the widest toe, and the explanation offered was the jump in black's curvature where the toe ends. It is not. A toe whose curvature is nothing at its end returns exactly the same cast, segment for segment, and a kink put into straight black casts in its own segment once in twelve tries. What the returned cast follows is how steep black has to be once the toe is done — how far the chromatic inks climbed while black was held back, and how fast they then have to come down.
Adapting to a brightened sheet leaves the glow
A pale tint on newsprint turns its hue one way and on coated paper the other, and a reader fully adapted to the paper sees newsprint's reversal vanish, because it was only the paper's colour. On a sheet with an optical brightener the tint turns the coated way and five times as far — 41.5 degrees for a fifth-coverage orange. A reader adapted to the sheet removes most of that, as expected, but not all: ten degrees stay. The sheet's colour adapts away like newsprint's. The brightener's glow does not, because the ink puts it out under the solid and leaves it under the tint, and an added light is not something adapting to a white can divide out.
The yellow stays sharp because it leans
A safety margin stated in ΔE₀₀ rounds almost every corner of a coated press, and leaves the solid yellow nearly as sharp as a cube's corner. The explanation offered was that the yellow's tongue points up towards lightness as well as out in chroma, so ΔE₀₀ — which shortens chroma at yellow five times and lightness one and a half — shortens it less than a pure chroma spike. Measured from the press's own cells, the tongue leans 23 degrees, less than predicted, and a cone about that axis rescaled by ΔE₀₀ accounts for the yellow's opening to within ten degrees; about a chroma axis it would open twenty-two degrees wider. ΔE₀₀'s own low hue weight at yellow, offered as the alternative, works the other way: it rounds the yellow. And the same account fails at every other corner.
An ink limit takes the shadows' cast away
A cap on total ink forces black up and the chromatic inks down where it is reached, which is the descent that brought a small cast back below a black-generation toe, and the prediction was that a cap would bring one back too. Measured against what the same strategy prints with no cap, it does the opposite. Below where it binds the cap decides the separation outright — nine strategies print one table there — and in 32 of 33 cases its shadows cast less than the strategy's own would have.
Nine black levels sharpened the press's corners
Three essays measured how far a safety margin pushes the corners of a coated press inward, and found them sharper than anything a smooth solid would have: the solid yellow moving nearly four times the margin, every corner past a cube's. Read by their ink recipes, three of the nine corners are vertices and six are edges, and each has a shape the press model's own derivatives state exactly. Against that shape the edges moved a quarter to two thirds too far. The reason is not the press. It is how the press was built: as three-ink solids at nine levels of black with nothing between them, so that every face black helps to make was scalloped. Walked at thirty-three levels, every corner moves within seven per cent of its own tangent shape, three of the nine are rounder than a cube's corner, and the solid yellow moves 3.2 times the margin, not 3.8.
The tolerance unit opens every edge
On a finely sampled press every corner moves under a CIELAB margin as a perfect corner of its own shape would, the shape read off the press model's derivatives. A print buyer states the margin in ΔE₀₀, and the census in that unit had been explained one corner at a time. Carried into ΔE₀₀'s local metric, the same shapes explain all nine at once: each of the six edges' predicted move lies within a tenth of the margin of the census's, and each vertex's within a seventh. ΔE₀₀ opens the edges from 67–141 degrees to 123–157, nearly faces, because a unit along chroma is three to five CIELAB units at these colours. The solid yellow's cone opens only to 59 degrees and stays the one corner sharper than a cube's. Without its chroma term, ΔE₀₀ would leave every corner as sharp as CIELAB does, or sharper.
The blue corner has nothing to twist
A safety margin's cost at each corner of a coated press is predicted by the corner's own shape, read off its ink recipe and carried into whatever unit the margin is stated in — for nine corners, none of them blue. At a hue near 275 degrees ΔE₀₀ has a rotation term that couples chroma and hue, and the prediction was that leaving it out would miss the press's blue corner by more than a tenth of the margin. At the blue corner the term is strong: ΔE₀₀'s local matrix correlates a chroma step with a hue step by three quarters. And it changes the prediction by three hundredths. The blue corner and its edges are already blunt in CIELAB — none moves more than 1.3 times a margin — and a corner that is nearly a face has nothing for a shear to twist.
A knee in the ink limit quiets the shadow
A cap on total ink coverage quiets a four-ink table's shadow, and the one segment where the cap is first reached is quiet or loud depending on where the binding point falls among the table's nodes: inside a segment it is quiet, within a quarter of a segment of a node it is not. A real cap is approached through a knee. The prediction was that a knee as wide as a segment would make the binding segment quiet wherever it fell, and that a knee much wider would turn the cap into a steep straight black that casts like the heavy-black strategy. The first half holds only in part: a five-unit knee halves the binding segment's cast and quiets three of the nine loud ones, but those whose binding point sits within a quarter of a segment of a node stay louder than a neighbour. The second half is wrong in sign. A wider knee leaves the whole capped shadow quieter at every step — its mean cast falls from 11.5 thousandths to 3.0 at fifteen units — because a knee spreads the chromatic inks' forced descent, and a slower descent is one the table's straight lines between nodes can follow.
Off the grey axis a knee trades hue for chroma
Along the grey axis a total-ink cap approached through a knee quiets the cast a four-ink table prints between its nodes, because the knee slows the chromatic inks' retirement where black takes over. In a saturated shadow the chromatic inks carry the colour, and the prediction was that a knee would quiet the hue error there in the same way, a fifteen-unit knee halving the worst segment's. On two rays of dark colours, a deep blue and a brown, it does quiet the hue — every wider knee lowers it on both — and halves the worst segment's on the blue, to 0.28 of the hard cap's, but not on the brown, at 0.68, whose inks the knee slows far less. And the hue was never the main error. Between nodes the table prints these colours duller than asked, its chroma error five to eight times its hue error, and every wider knee makes that loss slightly worse, so the table's total error rises as its hue error falls. The cap itself, met hard, halves the blue's error, as it removed the grey's cast; on the brown it changes almost nothing.
More nodes quarter the dulling and leave the knee a larger share
A four-ink table printing a dark saturated colour between its nodes prints it a little duller than asked, and a knee in the ink limit, which quiets the hue error, deepens that dulling by about a hundredth of a unit. The prediction was that doubling the table's nodes quarters the dulling — the square of the spacing — and the knee's added cost with it, so that on a dense table the knee's hue gain is all that remains. On tables of 9, 17, 33 and 65 nodes along a deep-blue and a brown ray, the dulling does fall about fourfold with each doubling, capped or not, to under a hundredth at 65 nodes. The knee's added dulling does not keep pace: on the blue it is 13 per cent of the hard cap's at seventeen nodes, 23 at 33 and 35 at 65, and the knee's whole error, an eighth more than the hard cap's at seventeen nodes, is a quarter more at 65. The knee keeps its hue gain at every density. A denser table shrinks every error and makes the knee's trade worse.
Three nodes at the cap's corner cut the dulling by a third
A four-ink table printing a dark saturated colour between its nodes prints it duller than asked, and at 65 nodes a fifteen-unit knee in the ink limit carries 35 per cent of that dulling on a deep-blue ray. The prediction was that the knee's added dulling sits in the two or three segments just below where the cap binds, and that three nodes placed there take its share back under a tenth. The first half holds: the knee's addition peaks one unit of lightness below the binding point and four fifths of it lies within seven. The second does not. Three nodes placed one, two and three units below the bind cut the hard cap's dulling by a third, 0.0097 to 0.0064, and the knee's by nearly two fifths, where three more evenly spaced nodes cut each by under a tenth — but the knee keeps a quarter of the dulling. The hard cap has a corner, which one node can catch; the knee has a bend spread over a dozen units, which three nodes split but do not straighten. A node at the binding point alone helps only the hard cap, and leaves the knee 41 per cent.
Shared nodes belong in the deep shadow
Three nodes placed just below where each dark colour's ink reaches the press's cap cut a four-ink table's dulling of that colour by a third — but a profile's nodes along lightness are shared by every colour, and the colours' caps bind anywhere from L* 15 to 31. The prediction was that one shared placement keeps two thirds of the own-placement gain on a deep-blue ray and all of it on a brown. Placed once, one to three units below the median binding point, the nodes keep 63 per cent of the blue's hard-cap gain and 92 of the brown's — and the averages hide a split. Every colour whose cap binds more than two and a half units below the shared nodes keeps under a twentieth of its own gain; every colour whose cap binds more than two units above them keeps more than all of it, up to four times. For those colours most of the dulling was never at the cap's corner: it lies in the deep shadow, where black keeps climbing under the cap, and the shared nodes sit there. Spreading the three nodes across the binding points buys nothing three even nodes would not.
Easing the cap reaches the deep shadow and no higher
A four-ink table prints dark saturated colours duller than asked between its nodes, and for colours whose ink reaches the press's total-ink cap high up the dulling lies mostly in the deep shadow below L* 20, where black climbs under a held total. The proposal was to let the total fall below the cap there, and the prediction was that easing the cap by a tenth or a fifth between L* 20 and the floor halves those colours' dulling on even nodes — more than three shared nodes do — at a cost of a unit or two of L* in the darkest colour the press can reach. There is no cost: every eased table still prints the floor at L* 14. Eased by a fifth, the deep-blue ray's dulling halves and the brown's falls to an eighth. But the eight colours that bind above L* 26 keep three fifths of theirs: the ease removes two thirds of their deep-shadow dulling and none of what lies between their binding point and L* 20. And the eased cap does not let black rise less steeply — it makes black rise faster.
A higher ramp trades one shadow for another
Easing a four-ink table's total-ink cap by a fifth on a ramp from L* 20 to the floor halves the dulling of dark colours whose cap binds low, and leaves the colours that bind high with three fifths of theirs, because most of what is left lies between their binding point and L* 20, above the ramp. The prediction was that a ramp starting at L* 32 halves the high binders' dulling, at a small cost to the low binders. It does neither. Started at L* 26, the same fifth's ease does cut the high binders' upper dulling by more than half — the cap was its cause after all — but their deep-shadow dulling comes back to more than twice what the L* 20 ramp left, and their total is unchanged at 0.0052. The low binders give back nearly everything: on the brown ray from almost nothing to 0.0084 with the ramp at L* 32. Every ray, knee and group does best, or within a fiftieth of best, with the ramp at L* 20.
A bent ramp takes more ink and dulls more
Easing a four-ink table's total-ink cap by a fifth on a straight ramp from L* 20 to the floor straightens the deep shadow's bend and halves the dulling of dark colours, and a ramp started higher trades the deep shadow's cure for the upper stretch's. The prediction for a ramp bent at L* 20 — a quarter of the ease spent between L* 32 and 20, the rest below — was that it keeps nearly all of the deep shadow's cure while taking a third off the high-binding colours' upper stretch, their total falling by a fifth. The bent ramp takes at least as much ink as the straight one at every lightness. It dulls every group more. The high binders' upper stretch improves by a sixth; their deep shadow loses half its cure, and their total rises from 0.0052 to 0.0060; the brown's low binders, left with almost nothing by the straight ramp, keep 0.0039. The deep shadow's cure follows how steeply the cap falls below L* 20 — a fifth of the cap over six units, not three twentieths — and not how much ink is taken there.
A steeper ramp cures the shadow by overshooting it
A four-ink press's total-ink cap dulls the deepest colours it binds, and easing the cap by a fifth on a straight ramp from L* 20 to the floor halves the deep blue's dulling. A ramp bent to take more ink above L* 20 dulled every group more, so the cure seemed to follow how steeply the cap falls below L* 20. The prediction was that a ramp steeper still — the whole fifth spent from L* 17 — cures more. Read as the census has read every ramp, by the mean chroma lost, it does: every group dulls less at each step from L* 20 to 18.5 to 17. But the brown's low binders cross nought: their prints come out more chromatic than the colour asked, by as much as 0.07, and read by the error's size the brown ray's mean error more than doubles. The measure that ranked every earlier ramp was signed, and a signed measure cannot see an overshoot. Eased by a tenth, the steep ramp is no worse anywhere and better on three cases of four.
Each dark ray wants its own ease
Easing a four-ink press's total-ink cap below L* 20 cures the dulling of the deepest colours it binds, and a steeper ramp — the whole ease spent from L* 17 — cures more on the signed mean, but eased by a fifth it prints the brown ray's low binders up to 0.07 more chromatic than asked and more than doubles the brown's error read by size. The prediction was that three twentieths from L* 17 is the ease the steep ramp wants: below every earlier setting on both rays. The brown still overshoots, by 0.039, and errs nearly twice as much as on the gentle ramp. The overshoot follows one number — how fast the eased cap gives ink back per unit of lightness — and the two rays want that number set differently. Hard, the blue errs least on three twentieths from L* 17 and the brown on three twentieths from L* 20; the brown's best costs the blue a fifteenth more error, the blue's best costs the brown four fifths more.
Named alongside it
The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.
SeparationInterpolationThe ICC profileInk limitGamutHalftoneGrey component replacementSpecificationToleranceCIELABQuality controlSubstrate