Digital BW, The Print

(Sorry for the delay in responding.)

On 12/18/02 8:33 AM, "Bruce Kinch" <pvx@...> wrote:

> Could commercial profile-building software do this?

Sorta.

Way, way, back in the old days (~1998), I used Horses MatchLock (now
ProfileMaker, I think) to profile MIS quadtones, and the process actually
worked fairly well.  However, since MatchLock didn't know that the inks
should be separated rather than combined, I still got fairly muddy prints as
compared with Piezography.

The other problem was that Horses eventually "fixed" some color-profiling
bugs, and broke the quadtone profiling.  (They never officially supported
it, and were more curious that I was even doing it, than interested in
working with it.)

I've talked to some color-profiling gurus, and they say that while it may be
technically possible to do grayscale profiling using ICC profiles, there
just isn't much interest in the professional world.  And the existing
measuring methods (IT8 targets, for instance) don't have enough information
to do a good job.

> Jon Cone has 
> noted that the ICQ profiles the Piezo driver uses are not the same as
> ICC color profiles, as a way of explaining why they couldn't generate
> them in VT.  Are they just LUTs?

The files are fairly small -- maybe 10k each in my install.  But even with a
6-color printer at 16-bit, that leaves a lot of sample points if they can
interpolate.  For a full 6-color, 16-bit LUT that has every value in it, the
files should be around 1.5mb each.

-- 
John Labovitz
johnl@...
www.johnlabovitz.com