17.4. Media Profiling

This section will cover the actual procedure for successfully creating media profiles for various printers that are supported by the Rosetta RIP. These vary greatly in ink configurations and printing characteristics and capabilities.

The latest high-end photo quality devices from Canon, EPSON and HP actually are the easiest and simplest one to do as a lot of the complexities of the profiling procedures, outlined previously, have been greatly simplified by the manufacturer. Effectively the hard work has already been done for you and most of the steps can be skipped. The steps for ink limiting and linearization have been embedded into the system and can simply be set by the media type assigned in the print mode of the profile table. In majority of the cases the actual profiling path for these devices is RGB Contone based that also results in achieving better colour gamut. Majority of these devices can also be profiled using CMYK Contone printing path if preferred.

For majority of other cases and manufacturers the profiling path is what we broadly term as CMYK halftone path. This caters for devices with four (CMYK) or more ink channels including light inks and extra ink channels such as orange or violet. Profiling procedure for this class of devices does require all previously mentioned stages to be carried out and hence is more time consuming.