[Scribus] Ink management proposals

[Janet Hawtin]

Hi folks

Sorry for the slow response
Heres some ideas.

Colour remapping from RGB to CMYK
Yes sounds nice but I think there should be a fairly accurate preview
of the image so you can see if it rejiggers colours dramatically as
you can get some pretty odd looking things in that transition. Would
be nice to be able to look at it and say yep that will map across
safely and OK it into the CMYK range.

Moire
Often moire occurs when people use an image which has previously been printed
scan the image in and then send the artwork to press - it gets
rescreened and the moire occurs when the second screening coincides
with the first dot pattern.
Usually with jobs with more than 4 colours it will be cmyk plus a
colour for a corporate logo and or a varnish or foil(gold) or emboss.
the non CMYK colours are often specified in order to get those effects
purely and so are often not used in a 'grey' way or screened as much.
If those colours were screened they could be treated like a cmyk job
with a monotone, duotone or tritone type of thing happening over the
top but yes the screen angles would get interesting.

I have often used moire as a feature using coarse grained line screens
to create texture so being able to scale or import textures or screens
which could be used might be nice. Mezzotint types of screens are sort
of gritty and irregular and are a handy way of avoiding moire on jobs
with prescreened imagery
moire generally happens on regular dot patterns.

Old bromide screens included wavey lines and concentric circles for
feral moire effects.

I have also used 2 colour inks such as orange and cyan to make a brochure which
used different kinds of duotone to create skin colour through to
black(100% overlay of orange and blue) on some pages and pale blue
through to amber on other pages. Being able to do this ready for press
is only possible if what you see on screen is really what you can get
on press.

As I understand it this is tricky with colour calibration on PC hardware as the
fine tuning of calibration is not there in the same way it is for
macintosh computers.
Theyve put a bit of effort into that aspect of things.

I certainly had a tricky time trying to scan in and replicate colour
accurately in print of some botanical illustrations with pale subtle
colours which tended to become more yellow through the scanning and
printing path even with be tweaking the colour.

This probably isnt relevant to Scribus from a software perspective
except to give an example of the kind of pale beige colours which were
in those are an example of colours that get made more primary through
gamut changes.

I guess to cut a long story short my answer re colour is that those
features sound great but the screen representation = print outcome
will be the clincher as to whether they are 'safe' to trust in terms
of what comes out of a press job = desktop printer = screen.

I have also wanted to be able to do artwork where I use the standard
CMYK plates to retain their screen pattern but to use spot colour inks
or split duct ink work to create different effects. This would be
possible with standard CMYK screens and plates and just a creative
printer on the press so is possibly not a must have for the actual
artwork.

Not sure if this helps.

Cheers

Janet