Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "Martin Wesley" <
mwesley250@e...> wrote:
> What do you recommend for an instrument to do this? I have seen the 
> Spectrocam at InkJetMall for $1,400 and the X-RiteColor Digital 
> Swatchbook also about $1,400. Is there a lower price point to get 
> into this?

I believe there is one called the ColorMouse that is much cheaper,
and 
you may be able to find a better price on the others by shopping 
around. Dan can tell you more about the Swatchbook. But all you'll be 
able to do with them is measure inks for CMYK custom setups for a
CMYK 
workflow like I use. It's really not a workflow I recommend for many, 
you'll need a RIP, there aren't many good ones, or affordable ones. 
For the printer/paper/ink combo I use it's great for the look I'm 
after. But for most an RGB workflow or Piezography will be better.
If you want to use a photospectrometer to nail Dan's RGB workflow, 
you'll also need Profiler Pro, another investment. There have been no 
reports that any other software can tough it out and actually build a 
profile from non color inks.
You could build a CMYK ink setup as above, but using the RGB driver, 
work in CMYK, then do Dan's CMYK/Multichannel/RGB conversion to
print, 
but you'll have some black ink things to solve by eye. For everything 
up until K kicks in, it would work well.
> 
> I assume that this type of measurement and adjustment is also valid 
> for printing through the Epson driver as well as through the RIP?
> 
See above, PS6 and Profiler Pro will actually allow you to see a real 
preview of your actual inks on the monitor using Dan's method.
Notice how often Dan is mentioned? I'm not sure it's possible to
print 
quads and not be a Dannite, even unwittingly. If I knew whether the 
chicken or the egg came first, I could even suggest the Cone driver
is 
Dannite.

> I think it is past time for me to get a copy of Real World
Photoshop 
> (Blatner and Fraser). In playing with this I notice that the 
> histogram is filled and smoother in comparing the adjusted 16-bit 
> file to the 8-bit.

Convert your 8 bit to RGB, run the sep curves and look how bad it is 
then!
Now do the same with the 16 bit staying in 16 bit all the way and 
you'll see quite an improvement. Does it print better?

> I believe in your last post you said you drop down to 8-bit just 
> before printing.

PressReady won't accept 16 bit files, since all the damage has been 
done at that point, dropping down doesn't really hurt. Even though
the 
Epson driver lets you hit the print command out of PS6 in 16 bit, I'm 
sure it's dropping it down on the fly, rather than making real use of 
all those bits.
I was hoping no one was actually paying attention enough to ask me
why 
I don't use the Cone driver! I was doing this workflow before it came 
out with different inks and it was hard to let go of direct control
of 
the inks. I can tweak a few things a little more to my liking, the 
black and overall hue of my prints are subtly different than with the 
Cone driver.The tonal transitions and dithering with his driver and 
profiles are so great, it was very hard to aproach that level of 
quality, and I'd never suggest I bettered it.
Tyler