Color separation for print

[Avondwinkel]

Hello,
This is one of my first posts here so I hope I'm not doing it all too wrong.

I've been doing some tryouts lately with a Ricoh printer and am struggling a bit with the reproduction of photographs. The printer I'm working with prints one color at the time: Blue (a tiny bit darker than process cyan), Yellow, vibrant red, rather dark green and black.
So far I've been using the CMYK color separation (and halftone screens), replacing cyan with blue and magenta with red, but the images that come out are, rather logically, more orange than they should be.

My question then is: Do you know a way to separate an image into a given set of colours? (here I guess these would be the blue, red, yellow and blacks I can print with)
I've been playing around a bit with Photoshop but didn't manage to do anything convincing so far. Maybe altering an ICC profile could be a lead but I have no idea how to do so.

Please let me know if you have any ideas!

Thank you

 

[MisterMe]

...

So far I've been using the CMYK color separation (and halftone screens), replacing cyan with blue and magenta with red, but the images that come out are, rather logically, more orange than they should be.

...

Color separations are done in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. That is why is called CMYK. This works because printed colors reflect and are substractive. If you substitute primary colors like red, blue, and green, then you will get distortions.

I might be helpful if you would explain what you are trying to do. Someone may be able to help you. As of now, you are walking down the wrong road.

 

[eponym]

Color separations are done in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. That is why is called CMYK. This works because printed colors reflect and are substractive. If you substitute primary colors like red, blue, and green, then you will get distortions.

I might be helpful if you would explain what you are trying to do. Someone may be able to help you. As of now, you are walking down the wrong road.

lol, he explained it quite well and seems to have a full understanding of what 4 color process is. It's you who is confused...


@ OP

Why are you doing the separations yourself? Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is digital printer of some sort, right? You shouldn't have to do any separation. You should just be able to print the flat CMYK original (or the RGB might be even better, since this is using a slightly different color model and might prefer to do all conversion itself).