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The reproduction of botanical art - part 4 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

by Mike McNamee Published 01/10/2007

Images
Almost the entire flower head is out of gamut for this vibrant amaryllis.
The blizzard plot shows that the scanner is capable of differentiating the reds quite well.
The blizzard plot over-layed with the Gamut of the printer and paper combination chosen shows that the tones are predominantly out of gamut. The visual effect was that the inkjet print looked a little duller than the original.Even these seemingly inocuous reds are out of gamut for UltraChrome K3 inks and fine art papers.

The spectral analysis showed quite high metamerism in the pigments (see table), the values between 11.9 and 15.7 jeopardising any hope of really accurate reproductions for all lighting conditions. The scan of the swatches also enabled us to create a blizzard plot of the pixels so that we could superimpose the printer profile and study the colourants relative to the gamut boundaries. The nature of the problem now becomes evident - the colourants are well divided by the scanner, with relatively little overlap, but much of the colour is some way out of gamut. What we observed in the prints was a compression of saturation as the values were brought back into gamut for printing. Changing to another printer and to a media with a much higher gamut volume did little to alleviate the matter, these cadmium-based pigments are quite intense. It remains to be seen whether the new Epson '880' series of printers with Vivid Magenta K3 inks can make any inroads into the deficit; it is not all that likely, as the 12-ink sets of both Canon and HP had a relatively small influence.

In order to explore the gamut employed by nature, we selected some bright flowers from the garden, measured them with the spectrophotometer and then scanned them. This is the final piece of the jigsaw - the petals are too far out of gamut for even the pig

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1st Published 01/10/2007
last update 09/12/2022 14:51:52

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The reproduction of botanical art - part 4 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8