Adding Red And
Green To The Mix Has The Potential Of Creating The Best-Looking
Images Yet
By Dikla Kadosh
We learned at a very young
age that we could mix yellow and blue paint to produce green paint,
red and yellow to make orange and so on. That discovery was exciting
because it gave us access to a broader range of colors. However, when
it came time to buying a paint set, we still wanted the one with eight
colors, not just three. Having only three colors was limiting, and
creating the other colors was time-consuming with often inconsistent
results. More colors meant brighter, more vivid pictures.
The trend in photo inkjet
printers is following the same principle: more colors mean better
pictures. Aiming to produce higher-quality photographic prints, several
manufacturers have recently come out with eight-color ink systems,
varying slightly in their choice of additional colors. Canon’s
ChromaPLUS system, showcased in its top-of-the-line i9900 desktop
photo printer, adds two separate red and green ink tanks to the traditional
cyan, magenta, yellow and black and the previous additions of Photo
Cyan and Photo Magenta. The two new inks allow you to print variations
in color that weren’t possible with a four- or six-color printer.
Any printer will be limited in the range of color that it can reproduce,
regardless of how many inks it uses. This range, or gamut, is only
a small subset of the visible spectrum; our eyes are capable of perceiving
a much broader array of colors. Traditional four-ink systems mix cyan,
magenta, yellow and black on paper to produce a limited number of
colors. By adding two more inks, Canon has expanded the gamut of its
printer in the red and green areas.
The red ink increases the orange/red gamut by approximately 60 percent,
making previously unobtainable orange hues as well as richer reds
possible. For example, sunsets will print with finer color gradations
and skin tones will look more subtle and realistic. The green ink
increases the green gamut by about 30 percent as compared to six-color
printers and creates deeper and more accurate greens, such as in grass
and foliage. This new advance reduces the restricting nature of printing
technology and nudges it closer to achieving a more realistic reproduction
of the colors we’re able to see.
An eight-ink printing system is capable of producing pictures with
finer details, smoother gradient transitions, more vivid colors and
less grain. The result is a photograph that rivals the quality of
those produced in professional labs.
