Digital BW, The Print

I took this up with Alan in another thread over on LuLa. Unfortunately the discussion in the thread you briefly participated in was far from complete and had many unhelpful tangential posts tossed into the mix. The arguments that ABW was never intended to be colour managed and it is a "black box" were most unhelpful. As were the references to "it's the OS" and colour printing workflows. Your post should have set the discussion on a more reasonable path but no one took you up on your suggestion and things weren't explored further. Removing the ability to print targets without colour management is rather stupid, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with OS-X enforcing a situation where if PS Manages Colors then colour controls in the driver are unavailable and vice versa. This would remove a great deal of confusion for many people not familiar with the vagaries of colour management. It's just a little annoying for people who do get CM and want to use a mixture of both PS and the driver doing colour management.

There do appear to be issues with QTR, ABW and OS-X (at least with 10.6.8) but they appear to be surmountable. I exchanged messages with Roy on this and he was, as ever, extremely helpful (and patient as I refreshed my memory on some of this stuff that I've been away from for awhile).  He commented that, at least with QTR,  OS-X always converts a greyscale image to Generic Gray Gamma 2.2. I decided to run a few tests with ABW. At least if PS is set to Printer Manages Colors (as this is what I was testing) OS-X 10.6.8 converts a greyscale file (whether tagged or not) to Generic Gray Gamma 2.2 Profile before it gets to Epson ABW as well. I printed an untagged step wedge, a step wedge converted to Generic Gray Gamma 2.2 Profile, a step wedge converted to Gray Gamma 1.8 and a step wedge assigned with Generic Gray Gamma 2.2.  The first 3 produced an almost identical L* ramp from the printer (similar enough for the variance to just be paper, ink drying etc). The last step wedge had a much different profile (and a more linear L* ramp suggesting no colour management adjustments). 

If the above is correct then when printing targets for QTR Create ICC profiling we would, I believe, need to assign Generic Gray Gamma 2.2 to the target before printing (Printer Manages Colors and your preferred ABW/QTR settings).  That way K values sent to the printer aren't altered. When printing an image with the resultant QTR ICC profile, we would need to convert the image to this profile and then assign Generic Gray Gamma 2.2 before printing with Printer Manages Colors and the ABW/QTR settings relevant to the selected QTR ICC profile.

It would be great if someone else using OS-X and ABW could confirm the results of the tests I did - and also if someone using 10.7.x could do the same.




On 11 Feb 2012, at 11:54, Ernst Dinkla wrote:

> On 02/10/2012 10:58 PM, steve5773 wrote:
> > With Profilemaker and its components not supported under Lion, is there
> > another accessible program to replace MeasureTool?
> >
> 
> ArgyllCMS has a spotread utility but there is more in this thread:
> http://www.freelists.org/post/argyllcms/FW-Profiling-Epson-ABW-Print-Driver
> 
> Be aware that there could be issues with QTR and recent Mac OSses + 
> Adobe apps + Epson drivers for target printing. Alan Goldhammer mentions 
> that in another thread on the LL forum. Adobe has a separate application 
> for target printing.
> 
> -- 
> met vriendelijke groeten, Ernst
> Shareware too:
> 330+ paper white spectral plots:
> http://www.pigment-print.com/spectralplots/spectrumviz_1.htm
> 



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