1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to printing apparatuses and printing methods.
2. Related Art
In recent years, printing techniques that use a special glossy ink, such as metallic ink, are being proposed. For example, the technique disclosed in JP-A-2010-76317 (see abstract) carries out printing that achieves both a sense of texture from a special glossy ink and color expressivity from color ink by specifying the color ink that is used the most when printing an image to be printed as a single primary ink; printing is executed after performing a halftone process through an ordered dithering method that continuously uses the same dither mask, so that when a metallic ink dot is “on”, the primary ink dot is not “on”, or in other words, so that the metallic ink dots and the primary ink dots do not overlap with each other.
When printing is carried out using a special glossy ink such as metallic ink, it is common to use a metallic plate for determining where and how much of the special glossy ink is to be added to the image to be printed, and the printing technique disclosed in JP-A-2010-76317 also executes printing based on a metallic plate configured by a user. Accordingly, past printing methods that use a special glossy ink have required the user to prepare a metallic plate him or herself before executing the print. Furthermore, even if the user has succeeded in creating a metallic plate by him or herself, there are cases where, depending on the scene expressed by image data, an optimal effect cannot be achieved using a single metallic plate.