Digital BW, The Print

Keith,

You wrote:

>... Profiling could serve a use in the following way...

>Supposing when doing the 1270/870 curves Dave FIRST profiles
>the ink and media...

>Then writes new transfer curves USING that profile...

>...

>Instead of creating newly tweaked curves for each and every paper, one
>could potentially simply profile the paper and then print via Paul's
>Curves..

>...

My original hope was that people could do paper profiles as Transfer
Functions to be applied after the usual variable-tone curve was applied.  I
did a rough one for Somerset Enhanced, for example.

I never envisioned everyone tweaking the curves.

I think the primary failure of the vm approach is that there has been no
pooling of such profiles, which I anticipated would happen.  Admittedly, the
transfer function tool is crude, which could be part of the problem.
However, I thought that doing rough profiles by just printing a 21-step test
file and correcting for the amount by which the steps are off would be easy
enough that people would just do it manually.

I have no experience with profiling software.  (In the minor color printing
I've done, the profiling software did such a bad job, I found manual tools
more useful.)  However, if some of that software could, even indirectly,
help write curves to be used to profile the vm and Epson FS printing curves,
that would be a big contribution to the effort.

One thing I think I've heard at least indirectly from a couple of posts is
that profiling software needs the driver color controls set to "no color
adjustment."  Is this true?

Between the possibility that the curves are cross-platform with that setting
and the possibility that profiling software may work better with "no color
adjustment" checked, I've started to write curves using that setting.  (The
sliders don't seem to work very well with the hextone printers anyway.)  If
there are other settings that are needed for profiling software to be useful
with the Epson driver, partitioned workflows, let me know, and I'll start to
incorporate those in the future curves I write.

Paul
http://www.PaulRoark.com