The move to digital commercial printing is happening, and is expected to become a major new market for digital printing products and services. The paragon of quality and productivity in the commercial printing world is analog offset printing, which has been perfected over almost a century. While home and office printing is RGB-centric, offset printing is CMYK-centric. Commercial printing workflows, tools, processes, and service providers are geared towards generating and manipulating CMYK content only, with a “generic” analog offset printing press as the (often implicit) reference. For a digital printing device to operate successfully in this context, it must deal with offset CMYK content, do so without requiring major changes in workflows, tools, or processes, and while producing excellent output quality. We describe a CMYK re-rendering method that guarantees high output quality and consistency with offset and other digital printers. At the same time it allows digital devices to make optimal use of their native color gamuts, often larger than offset.
Johan Lammens, Ján Morovic, Mary Nielsen, Huan Zeng, "Adaptive Re-Rendering of CMYK Image Data" in Proc. IS&T CGIV 2004 Second European Conf. on Colour in Graphics, Imaging, and Vision, 2004, pp 454 - 458, https://doi.org/10.2352/CGIV.2004.2.1.art00091