Digital BW, The Print

I may have missed an earlier post, but:  What kind of monitor do you 
have, and do you have any hardware/software for making profiles?  I think 
that the best but hardest way to have a what you see is what you get 
workflow is to have a good monitor that allows you to control the RGB, 
brightness, contrast, etc. controls individually and to have a puck (e.g. 
something like Colorvision's Spyder) and the OptiCal/PreCal software that 
goes with it to be able to read the info directly from the monitor's 
screen.  You choose a white point for the monitor and create a profile 
for your particular monitor that essentially corrects its way of making 
colors to a standard.  Once that's done you can also use profiling 
software to make a profile for the particular printer/ink/paper 
combination(s) you're using, and then in theory what you see on the 
monitor should be what you get in a print.  

In all fairness, it's neither foolproof nor 100% reliable, since there 
are so many gremlins out there.  And a print, created with dyes or 
pigments, and which we see with light reflected off the surface will 
never look just like a monitor image.  But it can get you very close and 
it can save you the time and hassle of making print after print and 
making change after change to a file to get something to look good.

Stephen Petegorsky
petegorsky@...
www.spphoto.com