1. Maybe it's not that professional either of them. They have different way of producing dot as opose to screen dot on a plate and real professional equipment. Resolution could be part of reason too.
2. There is. If you put your eyedropper on your white background and it reads 1%, it will show up on plate as 1%, or at least it should be. What more do you want?
3. Possibly, hard to tell without proper test.
4. That digital proof is probably comparable with what you call Professional wide format inkjet or even worse, some digital colour laser, Pictro, ... hence the low price but you get what you pay for.
That expensive proof is probably your best bet if it's real screen dot proofer, like Kodak XP but in that case it would be pricy and I am sure it would show 1% screen.
Believe it or not this 1% we pickup on our low-end Iris43wide on 360 dpi, thta's the only thing it's good for
It all depends on device and setup, YMMV.
5. Right
6. If we get it, we seal it by going to curves and pulling down 1% dot to 0.
Image is not affected overal much by 1% and it seals the bacground. This is quick and dirty trick.
I suggest you start working on your color management skills and try different setups with the same problem image until you find one that does not introduce 1% in white and color is pleasing.
It's all in ICC.
7. Look at number 6 answer.
8. Clipping paths go back as far as I can remember, maybe even from original version of Photoshop.
They can be slow method of clipping and before all this new transparency capabillity of new modern software, clipping path was the only way to safely cut out image from background and puting it on another or have the object "float". They still are very reliable method but one that I see less and less. Today's modern tools can do very good job of automatically creating clipping path. I used to do a thousands of clipping paths manually, node by node, which in itself is a skill. Zoom in 200% on image, start with first node and off you go, the key is to create great path without introducing too many nodes.
9. Look at my answer number 4.
10. If you are not experienced with color, I would advise you to leave it in RGB with instruction to your printer to pay attention to it and convert to CMYK. This way if your printer introduce the same problem (which is quite possible, believe me) they would be held accountable and be responsible for fixing, not you. If youw ant to learn, ask your printer for direction, profile, etc.. and do tons of tests. Youc an even send your tests to printer to give you proof and you can ask for deal since you will be sending "real" job so they won't charge you, etc..
Anything is possible and the key to success is to learn and talk to your printer, you can gain a lot of knowledge this way.
Good luck.
