Do RIPS flatten colour??

I've seen some claims by printing companies that they do not use RIPS because they "flatten" colour. I've checked as best I can on the net and there seems, to a novice like me, to be some element of truth in it, particularly with PDFs. Curious what the verdict is though here on the forum, is it a truth, a half truth or a furphy?

Hal55

I don't even know what "flatten the color" means. Not a clue. I'm not a color expect but I know enough to get by, professionally.

I suggest you do test prints with a lab and trust your eyes. Use sRgb for printing unless advised otherwise by your lab.

My guess is that there are no dodgy RIPs, only dodgy operators.

The color management settings within the RIP which are determined by the color operators / color management guru's can have an effect on your proof... IE. if you have a printer that print's CMYK only and you supply an image in an sRGB colorspace, and they in turn just "drop" your image to print, it has to be converted into something the printer can see and turn into numbers.. They may have a setting saying sRGB gets converted into Swop3. But if they have an sRGB printer then nothing is done to the image in the RIP.. If color's get "flattened" it probably means the photographer over saturated his image in post processing or very simply the printer can't reproduce such a vibrant color. Sometime's color conversions themselves can flatten colors but this can be seen upon conversion and compensated for somewhat.. That is if someone is actually taking the time to look at an image and manually doing the conversion which I doubt most labs do.
If someone blames their RIP for bad color they probably just don't understand the nature of color management..

Thanks for the advice Paul, much appreciated.

Hal55