Digital BW, The Print

I've written a program that produces ICC profiles for Quadtone (or 
Hextone, for that matter) printers. It attempts to reduce the 
visibility of dots and to provide smooth gradients. Although I don't 
plan to release the software (it has no GUI and I don't plan to build 
one) I'd like to post profiles it produces to the group but I don't 
know how. Moderator, could you help me?

So far I've only profiled the Epson 1160 using MIS Full Spectrum 
Quadtone inks on Epson Enhanced Matte paper. For the time being I'm 
providing this free to anyone who wants to use it, subject to 
copyright of course. I'm still developing the software so the profiles 
will change over time.

The 1160 printer settings should be:

Matte Paper - Heavyweight
Color mode checked
1440 DPI
High Qualtiy Halftoning
High Speed: Off
'Color Controls' selected, Automatic mode, all sliders at 0


Some of the features of the profile are:

- Standard ICC profile, so it should work with any ICC-compliant 
software, such as QImage and Photoshop. 
- Uses standard Epson driver (of course) which means no weird 
interface to learn
- Far fewer dots than the Epson driver alone, but not as dotless as 
the Cone driver plugin
- Supports "preview" mode in Photoshop (and other software using 
ICC-based previews). Preview mode is a very nice feature since you can 
keep the file as a color file, switch to Preview with this profile, 
and tweak the RGB channels to create different B&W effects. I 
recommend you do all tweaking in Preview mode since the profile does 
alter the grey output somewhat (to be fixed in a future version). The 
preview is fairly accurate.

Known problems:

- The greyscale isn't properly calibrated (I don't have a reflective 
Q60 target. I'll have to order one soon... Anyone willing to donate 
one? :-) ).
- There are still dots, but I'm slowly convincing myself that dots are 
OK as long as the gradients are smooth
- It's rather large. I haven't bothered to reduce the size yet.

Note that this is an ALPHA version. I welcome feedback but please 
don't expect me to support your color management efforts. 

- Steven Kasapi