If you have special inks loaded, such as a penetration liquid, dilution ink, mask or white inks, you can set parameters for this in the Mask channel settings window. The 'Mask...' button becomes available when you select one of the following inks: Mask, White (background), Dilution ink.
Get from alpha channel : As the name says, the image to print requires an additional Alpha channel added to the image, e.g. manually created in Photoshop. The ink then uses the channel information to print the content. Depending on the printer, the ink will be printed in a separate pass or simultaneously with the other inks.
Full mask : neoStampa will create a flat color underneath the image whenever a pixel is present (with Photoshop: always; with Illustrator or CorelDraw: whenever an object contains a color information, such as white). Note that the full mask generation is only done if the image is in Grayscale, RGB, CMYK or LAB, but not with multichannel files. So, when printing linearization targets the full mask will not print.
Shadow mask : neoStampa will create an intelligent grayscale mask under the image information according to its color intensity and color darkness. Usually, this mode is used when printing white ink, e.g. for T-shirt printing. Note that the Shadow mask generation is only done if the image is in Grayscale, RGB, CMYK or LAB, but not with multichannel files. So, when printing linearization targets the shadow mask will not print, but it will be generated when printing the ICC target.
Fill ink : This method is usually used for penetration liquid or for a fill-up ink, such as dilution inks or similar. The penetration liquid is provided by several ink suppliers with the idea of helping inks in lower percentages to penetrate through the textile media. The fill ink method needs specifying an Intensity and Minimal value explained underneath.
Put ink in white pixels : Usually white pixels do not require a penetration liquid or dilution ink-since the area is not printed anyway- , which results in ink savings. In certain printing environments (e.g. carpet printing using Zimmer ChromoJET800) this check-box helps to create a blocking area around the colored image using dilution ink to prevent colors from bleeding into non-printed areas. Note that "white pixels" refer to an image information with an object containing no color (with Photoshop: always; with Illustrator or CorelDraw: whenever an object is found containing a white color).
Intensity : The Fill ink method will fill up with dilution ink, whenever this specified value is not reached by the absolute amount of other inks in the ink set. So, when you print 10% Cyan+25%Magenta+30%Gray, the absolute amount of ink will be 65%. In this case, neoStampa will automatically add a 35% of dilution ink for better penetration.
Minimum value : Specifying a minimum value for the Fill ink method adds a certain amount to an absolute ink amount in any case. Scenario: If you set intensity to 100% and the Minimum value to 10% and the absolute amount of ink of 25% Cyan+35% Magenta+ 75% Gray exceeds the 100% of specified Intensity, then neoStampa will add another 10% on top of it. This will help the ink to penetrate even more, but can also cause a certain amount of bleeding if applied too much. This value should be used with care.
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