[Radiance-general] printing floating point images

[Carsten Bauer]

Georg Mischler wrote:
> Peter Apian-Bennewitz wrote:
> 
> 
>>Carsten Bauer wrote:
> 
> 
>>>cmyk is probably a bit out of date nowadays, it always was a rather
>>>poor standard suitable for those big printing machines of former time.
>>
> 
> The pigments on a print will almost always be cymk (sometimes
> augmented with additional colors). This has nothing to do with
> "big machines of former time", but simply with the laws of
> physics.
> 

hmm, if it were for the physics alone, we wouldn't need the k, so we'll 
have to take chemistry and engineering (and of course physiology) into 
account, also. In most high-quality printing jobs (e.g. art catalogues) 
additional pigments are used to overcome the cmyk (saturation)-limitations.

But instead of quarreling about this I simply wanted to say that the new 
RGB laser printers usually do a very good job with their automatic 
operation, at least for images without strong color bias.
I admit that I haven't bothered so far about what's going on inside the 
machine, they're very expensive, so I believe you that some complicated 
stuff is working inside.)

I also think it's out of question that the contrast range and color 
saturation of machine made prints cannot compare to those of 
transparencies or oil paintings. But the color resolution of those laser 
prints is fairly high so you can get a lot of information from the image 
onto the print also. I noticed this once in a negative sense, when I 
hoped that some faint splotches which were hardly visible on the screen 
would finally disappear on the print due to limited color space 
resolution - they didn't, and remained nicely visible.. :-(

ahmm, and yes, Rob, I meant of course pcond..

-cb