Digital BW, The Print

Hi all,

I have an Epson Color Stylus 1160 equipped with a Nomorecarts CIS primed
with MIS FS/FS-N Black + Piezotone Selenium Gray inks. Although having
PiezographyBW installed on my computer (PC), I exclusively use Jeff
Randalls Partitioned Worklow with Epson Archival Matte and Hahnemuehle
Photo Rag 188 papers. I'm happy with the results I get with Randall WF
except for the following points:

1) Heavy ink usage [which causes disturbingly wavy prints on EAM - less
but present on HPR 188]
2) Low CYAN usage [It seems that the Randall curves/Epson driver
combination substites CYAN with BLACK and this makes a negative
influence on hue/chromacity I think]

The reasons for not using PiezographyBW are as follows (please note that
I get perfect nozzle checks before every print):

1) Microbanding mostly pronounced in the 80 - 50% range [seems like
being a CYAN related issue???]
2) Flat midtones [something fixable with monitor/print matching
operations I guess]
3) Inconvenient monitor/print matching behaviour [as an individual
accustomed to and using ICC scanner/monitor/printer profiles effectively
- I run a calibrated system, I find the custom dot gain approach
PiezographyBW totally odd]

In the other hand Piezography has the following advantages:

1) less (read as not wavy prints) and
2) balanced (read as better hue/chromacity) ink usage

So I decided to take the struggle in order to make PiezographyBW work -
completely disregarding the microbanding problem, assuming that I may
get rid of it by changing the CYAN ink and/or applying windex treatment.
Although I didn't run the 20" paper feed test, I'm pretty sure that
paper feeding is OK...

First of all, I printed a 21 step wedge just selecting the appropiate
printer/icq profile combination in the plug in.

After waiting around 1 hour I further dried the print (both front and
back) with a hair drier.

I scanned the print (100% size @ 300dpi, 16 bits grayscale mode, no
setpoint, contrast/gamma adjustments) with my calibrated scanner, then
in Photoshop I gaussian-blurred the image by 4-5 pixels diameter (to get
rid of the possible dots, dithering, paper texture and scanner noise). I
set the blackpoint to 100% patch and white point to the paper white.

Then I placed a curves adjustment layer over the background and watching
carefully the color sampler I designed my custom dot-gain curve. When
finished, I checked if the color sampler shows the right K values over
each patch - it was right on.

Here comes the question: instead of setting this as my grayscale preview
profile for that particular paper, I want to view and edit the file in
gamma 2.2 grayscale space and apply a curve just before exporting it to
PiezographyBW. I tried to output by using this method and the tone
separation was better compared to the no-curves-applied output. The
problem is that the curve is thinning the image - increasing the gamma I
presume - I get a much lighter image than what I see on my screen (in
the other hand, Randall's workflow output matches my monitor quite
good). What should I do? Should I play with gamma setting in the
PiezographyBW software? Am I in a completely wrong way?

I would like to hear your thougths and suggestions...

Thanks in advance,
Loris.