Digital BW, The Print

>Good luck.
>
>Todd

Well, luck apparently isn't with me.

Having spent most of yesterday gathering wisdom from all of you, I went
home full of hope to apply it. I set the Photoshop Color Settings to
"Photoshop 5 Default Spaces." I sharpened the image a bit more than seemed
advisable. I even tried converting the RGB image to 16 bits per channel.
Everything I printed out looked pretty much the same as before.

I think the problem is that I just don't like the way the Epson 1160 driver
lays down whatever is in the CMY cartridge. It is, after all, the Epson
driver that's doing the work: it has no idea what's in the cartridge, or
what unusual curves may have been applied to the image. The Epson driver
uses widely-spaced dots of ink to render very light tonalities, and I
believe it "cheats" by laying down what I see as "patches" of ink in areas
where there is very little variation in tonality. The result is so
different from what I understand as a "photograph" -- tiny bits of
deepest-possible black on white paper -- that I cannot accept it as output
for my pictures.

This leaves me back where I started from, i.e. either using only the black
cartridge, or finding an acceptable substitute for Piezo inks and exporting
through the Piezo driver.

Either way, I need better inks. For black-only, I want the intensity of the
Epson OEM black cartridge with better stability, at least behind glass or
in a plastic sleeve in the dark. (Fade resistance on a south-facing
windowsill or the back shelf of the car is not relevant: people who subject
my prints to that sort of treatment deserve what they get.) By "stability"
I mean not so much archival life as some assurance that the image tone and
color will not radically fade or shift on a time scale of weeks to months
after printing. Does such a beast exist? If not, how close to the Dmax of
Epson black can I get? Another useful piece of information would be the
intensity sequence of the paper profiles in the Epson Print dialog, i.e.
which paper setting lays down the most ink, and which the least. I know
this was discussed a few weeks ago, but I can't find the information.
Thanks for any pointer to archives, etc.

If Piezo, then I need to find out if the MIS Full-Spectrum set will work
with the Piezo driver. If it does, then its image tone needs to be
considered, and adjusted if necessary by tinting with color ink. Laborious,
but a possible medium-term solution.

Whatever I do, or any of us does, is in any case going to be superseded in
a matter of months. I cannot imagine that Jon Cone and even Epson are
standing still; I also cannot imagine that every single photographer
investigating digital output is striving for the same smooth, warm,
pseudo-platinum look of present-day quadtone methods. 35mm photographers,
arise! You have nothing to lose but your developer stains!

Any advice on nice black inks will be much appreciated. Thanks again to all
of you for your time and attention.

-- Nick

NICHOLAS HARTMANN                                +1 (414) 271-4890
611 N. Broadway, Suite 509                  fax: +1 (414) 271-4892
Milwaukee, WI 53202, USA                       polyglot@...

Technical and scientific translator:  German and French -> English