Print process

[Michael Syrigos]

There's something that's been bugging me for years, and it may be obsolete now I am not sure,
but it's certainly something I'd like to know.

Before going on I have to say that I understand (generally) how printing printing works, that
different pigments are used, effectively having a different color space than an oil painting etc.

Yet, the differences in the art pieces I'll mention, are so profound, that it seems ludicrous to
attribute so much, to just the difference of color space between the painted illustration and the
printed product, much less understanding how this will actually come out, cause it may be worse
than the painted image, causing a negative impact in comparison to the illustrations' goal.

Now, the first image below, if you've never seen it before, don't bother, just never draw anything
other than letters and numbers from no on please. Following the original, is how it appeared on the
printed cover to the book it was meant for. The differences are striking in a way that makes one
assume it was "color corrected" in Photoshop or something. No this can't be a color space thing.

The background to the whole image is painted monochromatically, with yellows, the lights
on all the skulls and stuff in the background are essentially the same hues as the flames (only
they are washes ok), yet the flames, although they have less chroma and a toned down in the
cover, are still very high in tone and retain their hues, yet the background has changed completely!
The main character also is in lower key chroma yes, but the high lit parts as well as the parts
with greens in the original, are all shifted to even higher key chroma greens and blues, having
no relation to the original. Hell, there's even parts where the yellows of the backgrund were
used to paint the light side on the figure, yet in the printed version the light sides of the figure
have very little, if any relation to the same yellows and how they are different in the same image
on the printed version! Other examples of images are even crazier and sometimes (like in the
case of Conan the Buccaneer, especially on Frazettas' Icon book cover) they make for very
interesting images in comparison to the original.

The thing is that, all this seems random. I assume printing has advanced since the 60's and such
discrepancies aren't around anymore, but this is a double edged sword because we might be missing
something nice on one hand, on the other, what the hell was going on during the printing of these
images? Why did they turn out so different?