Digital BW, The Print

On 1/1/03 8:43 PM, "danielstaver <daniel@...>"
<daniel@...> wrote:

> After spending the whole night installing Red-Hat linux on a virtual
> machine (I normally use windows) and compiling various packages to
> get Gimp-Print to work I finally got to try how it would do BW
> printing on the 2100.

Wow, that's dedication!  I'm curious -- is the virtual machine a commercial
product, or something that's free?

Exactly how are you getting the image to gimp-print?  Through Gimp itself?

> What I would like to do now is to somehow get Gimp-Print to print
> using only the two blacks, but tint the image with one additional
> colour. The Epson blacks are pretty warm, so I'd like to add a small
> amount of cyan to get a more neutral image. I would be grateful if
> someone with more experience with Gimp-Print could guide me in the
> right direction on how to do this.

You might be able to do this by sending a CMYK file to gimp-print.  If you
use the "Raw CMYK" output mode, you can control each of the main ink colors
separately.  Note that gimp-print still handles the light-regular crossover,
so it's not truly a raw mode, but it's closer than sending RGB.

Anyway, if you set up a Photoshop file to be CMYK, but have your main image
as grayscale on the K channel, and the "toning" on the C channel, you might
be able to make this work.

Try this:

    - open your grayscale file (and do a Save As just in case!)

    - convert to multichannel mode

    - go to the Channels palette

    - duplicate the "Black" channel three times

    - convert to CMYK mode

    - select each of the M and Y channels in turn, and erase their contents
(I use command-backspace on my Mac)

    - tune the C channel as desired (using Levels or Curves)

    - print, making sure you specify "Raw CMYK" in the gimp-print settings

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