Simulating another printer can be useful in case a printer is replaced by another printer and repeating work has to be exactly reproduced. Especially spotcolours are vunerable as they are moved inside the gamut of the printer. When the old printer its gamut is significantly different from the new printer the spot colour reproduction might also be significantly changed (e.g. new printer has a larger gamut than the old one).
Start by selecting a printer and print mode that represent the new printer or print condition. Right click on the print mode to open context menu with special functions. From the context menu select “Simulate Printer”.
After which the configuration screen appears where the printer and print mode to simulate are chosen.
There are 2 types of links possible: Keep Separation / Visual Match:
- Keep Separation : When the printer to simulate and the target printer are very similar in ink-type and colours this option gave the best reproduction as the separations are left as-is and the ‘feel’ of the output is preserved.
- Visual Match : In case the printers are different then this method gives a close as possible match between them based on the colorimetric values, but the separation will look quite different.
Behaviour
The created print mode behaves in all application (like Editor, Layout, Hotfolder queue) the same as the simulated printer. In Calibrator this is different as it presents the gamut of the simulated printer, but has as output the ink-set of the target printer.
Recalibration
Recalibrating a simulation mode will recalibrate the simulated gamut on the target printer. This means that Calibrator will try to come as close as possible to the simulated gamut using the method chosen during creation (Keep Separation or Visual Match). As long the simulated gamut is smaller than the target gamut there is no problem. When the target gamut is smaller than on the compressed areas this might lead to visible breaks during (multi iteration) recalibrations.
Spot colours
Spot colours are converted first to simulated printer; thus retaining the same mapping to the gamut when the colour is out of gamut. After the conversion the resulting colour is mapped to the target printer.
This 2-step approach prevents that spot colours could suddenly deliver better, but different, colours when the target gamut is larger or differently shaped.