Gamut compression and giclee printing
I feel we need to address the issue of digitally created files and giclee printing. As I wrote in past posts, giclee printers do have a wide color gamut, far surpassing that of conventional cmyk printing methods (press). This said, we do get digital files with such extreme colors and see clients who expect the chromatic rendition to match what they see on the screen. There is absolutely no way that a pure blue (RGB 0,0,255) can possibly be printed. What a printer will do is see that the colors cannot be rendered as indicated by the file and consequently compress the gamut to suit the paper profile. Different paper/printer combinations have different capabilities. Given the same printer, a glossy or satin photo like paper has a wider gamut than canvas. When choosing canvas, different types have different gamuts as well. Blues tend to be the hardest to reproduce and this is mostly due to the nature of the inks, which fall short when trying to reproduce bright blues. What can be done is to reduce saturation and sometimes change the hue to bring colors within printer/paper gamuts. If this is not done and gamut compression is left to the printer software, severe color shifts will happen.