Printing with light: daylight–fluorescent inks for large-gamut multi-color printing

Abstract

With printing technologies continuously reaching ever higher degrees of performance and quality, the need for novelty and impact and also keeps increasing. Specialty inks have always played an important role here, albeit not without challenges. Often the use of such materials involved dedicated solutions that deal with these inks outside of the constraints of normal pipelines and workflows, which constrains their application and results in limited use. This is so since specialty inks, such as fluorescents, behave differently to traditional dye or pigment-based ones. So much so that most applications use specialty inks as spot colors, explicitly determining (by means of a separate layer in the input) where they are to be used for given content. For example, for materials such as fluorescents or quantum dots, the possibility of presenting more light at a given wavelength than is incident at that wavelength, breaks some of the basic assumptions of current processes, from how they are measured to how they can be used in building color separations all the way to how color management deals with them. In this paper we describe first experiments of using fluorescent inks that are activated by visible – instead of the more customary UV – radiation, showing performance of spectrophotometer measurement with a dedicated model to handle the specific properties of these inks, as well as results of the impact such inks can have on extending color gamuts that go significantly beyond current printing gamuts and therefore also pose new challenges.