What happens to your CMYK profile at the printers? How does that affect TIC?

Say I work in CMYK, embed the profile in the PDF and send off to the printers. Say it has a TIC of 330%...

Hopefully, the printer will use my profile to print.
Do they ever do that?

They 'strip' my profile and use their own, say a 'similar' 330% TIC profile.
Everything should be okay, then?

They 'strip' my profile and use a profile with say 300% TIC.
Does that put too much ink on the print?

They 'strip' my profile and use a profile with say 400% TIC.
Now my blacks print lighter?

They don't 'strip' my profile and use their own profile on top of it.
Is that possible?

If the profile is 'stripped' from my PDF, what does that mean in fact?  Especially in terms of the TIC?

?

Seamus

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  • Ok here is how it's supposed to work and it does for the most part but for some unknown reason some people open your PDF in Illustrator or InDesign and output from there. Then all bets are off, the concept is as foolish as drilling holes in the bottom of your fishing boat!.

    With that said in a proper postscript/PDF work flow the printer establishes an ink limit linearization dot gain curve for their work flow (press).  it is not an ICC profile but it does have a TIC. Your file is imported to into their prepress workflow and when your file is processed it ignores the ICC profiles HOWEVER it uses the CMYK numbers which were established in your file by the ICC profile and when you created the file. 

    Remember an ICC profile has ZERO effect on CMYK color unless its being converted from another color space or model. Then it established the gray balance curves and the TIC. Vectors or raster objects created directly in CMYK are unaffected by the profile and the CMYK numbers in the file just pass along.

    So if the press linearization dot gain curve has a TIC of 310 and if your images were converted from RGB to CMYK with an ICC profile with a TIC of 330 and contents of your file were created with content exceeding the TIC of 310 then the process will compress the dynamic range of your color to fit. 

    Ergo you will lose 5 points per channel in theory 20 points total. In reality it does this compression in a perceptual manner and unless you really know what you're looking for you'll miss it. 

    People with 45 years of experience like me actually plan for this to make images ( in laymen terms) pop on press, increasing the perception of contrast but it's only an illusion.

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