Digital BW, The Print

Hello,

First off, I wanted to thank Paul Roark for all the work he's done with getting this cheap printer working with the carbon inks!

Anyways, I just set up my Epson Workforce 1100 and EB4 inks but I've run into some problems.

I've tested some of the profiles Paul made with my cheap epson presentation matte paper to see if I can get something close, but I'm getting this weird problem when printing the 21 step wedge. Somewhere between step 7 and 8, the shade dips, i.e. darker, darker, lighter, darker, darker. 

I thought maybe it was just caused by paper so I decided to create my own profile using the aurora curve that Paul mentions as working with most papers. 

While following the instructions, I began getting more and more confused. I applied the curve to the PS raw file. Then I also applied the same curve to the step wedge. How does an RGB curve work with a grayscale file? How does it know which ink color to use? Also, this made the step wedge white from steps 1 through 10. Is this right? 

I wasn't sure what profile I was supposed to print with, but I chose Gray Gamma 2.2 (same as my working space). Is this right?

I used my spyder3print sr to take the linearization measurements. First I used steps 1-21, even though 1-10 were white.

I dropped the raw file and the exported txt file onto the qtr-icc-rgb file and it created the icc. It also gave me a warning in the text file that a soft proof could not be created because the rgb curves (raw file I'm assuming) werent in ascending order. The resulting profile gave me a printed step wedge of middle gray to black but spread out from 5% to 100% then white on 0%.

I also tried taking measurements of just steps 10 through 21 where step 10 was the last white step before it started turning gray. It resulted with a printed step wedge of something similar to Paul's aurora profile I just printed with a little dip in step 7. It also still doesn't look very linear. 

The last thing I tried was printing the step wedge with no curve applied using the gray gamma 2.2 as the printer profile. The printed wedge though not linear, did not have any dip in the gradation. I then took the measurements with the spyder. I dropped just the text file on the qtr-icc-rgb creator (no raw file used). The resulting profile gave me a nice linear step-wedge. The problem is that the middle grays look more coarse like it's using more of the K inks.

I thought maybe I received the EZ inks by mistake, but from looking at the coating ink leaves in each bottle, the shades look different.

Thank you in advance!!