to the best of my knowledge, neither supports controlling the amount of ink to make the films correct density. . .
pierre
Don't know about all brand printers, but I can control the density on my Epson 1400 (at print time) by sliding the "Brightness" bar to -25 and the "Saturation" bar to +25 for darker prints. No other adjustments needed.
I know Ghost is the red-headed stepchild for RIPS, but it is free, often updated, and has always done what I needed for halftone prints.
The ink density being controlled by the sliders may due just that, (control the density), but back to Pierre’s point is that this Density is just one part that helps burn better screens and hold smaller dots. That makes the ink layer
more opaque but plays a role in affecting the “gain”.
as does Slow speed versus High Speed printing and Bi Directional printing versus Uni-Directional printing. But the control he’s talking about is on the % of tones that come out. Are they accurate or the right size? How do you compensate (in the Ghost RIP) for this? So Lets say your dots are very opaque. As opaque as you need and then some. But are your 10% dots coming out as 15 or 17? Maybe they are lighter and the 10% area is coming out at 6 or 8%? A good RIP has an area in there that looks much like the CURVES in Photoshop that enable you to compensate in there for this. How this areas looks, really depends on the RIP brand. I’ve seen some where you just enter in the numbers in a grid. Most others look more like curves in Photoshop. All printers don’t print out a 50% at a true 50%. Little do many know that when you need to have them print out precise or linearized, you need to compensate for what it is giving you. and how you use the printers (how they are set up) determines how much more gain there is at output. You begin by reading what you are getting from your printer at a documented setting that you like. Then you read this with the densitometer.
