Color printing with inkjet printers

I’ve been asked to expand on yesterday’s inkjet printing tutorial by explaining how color works in modern inkjet printers. I will attempt that here, but there’s a big, fat caveat: many of the details of this process are deliberately or inadvertently obscured by the printer manufacturers, so I am forced to come up with plausible, more-or-less standard data flows that may not be entirely accurate and may vary from printer manufacturer to printer manufacturer. I’m also going to restrict this discussion to CMYK (four color) printers. Introducing light magenta, light cyan, light black, green, orange, etc. inks has advantages in printing, but including those printers in this discussion would introduce complexity that would make this tutorial hard to understand. I’m also going to cast this discussion around the Epson printer system. I’m doing that because it’s the system that I understand the best. I expect that most of the data pipeline that I will describe here translates fairly well to HP…