Digital BW, The Print

For the first time after two years of on-again/off-again dabble-ing, I can 
finally print!  I bought a set of Lyson QuadBlack inks way back then, and 
never had any success in getting a printed image that resembled anything 
close to what was on my screen.  That was Windows.

So for the past few weeks I've been trying to pull this off in Linux with 
Roy's QuadToneRIP package (this is very much a spare-time hobby for 
me).  And as of tonight, I'm getting prints that translate very well from 
screen to paper!  I manipulate the image in GIMP, and print it using qtcups.

In fact, I may have achieved the world's cheapest system for QuadTone 
printing -- other than inks and paper, all I've paid for is my film scanner 
and a $100 printer from eBay.  GIMP, Linux, and QTR2 are all free -- I 
don't even own a PhotoShop license....

My method for getting all of this working ended up to be quite 
unscientific.  I couldn't ever get Roy's CMYK Calibration document to print 
correctly in Linux, and I certainly don't own a densitometer or any other 
fancy calibration gear.

So I resorted to trial and error.  I put a 21-Step image on the screen, and 
kept mucking around until my prints looked like the 21-Step.


I ended up with some rather wacky settings -- and I certainly confess 
ignorance, here.  So if any of you have any insights as to what I'm doing 
to myself behind the scenes, please let me know:

--*-- I had to do some extreme boosting on the Yellow channel, because 
anything under 10% was pure white on my prints.  I cut the stated 
percent-of-black all the way down to 1%, and boosted the Yellow channel to 
1.2 in qtcups.  Magenta went down to 10% of black, and Cyan was 44%.  I 
kept all of the other QuadTone RIP settings at their default values.

--*-- In qtcups, I brought gamma all the way down to 0.7, and increased 
saturation to 1.15.


Wacky or not, what I see in GIMP is pretty much what I see on paper -- so 
I'm quite happy.  I can finally start looking at my work on something other 
than a contact sheet!

Thanks in advance for any suggestions or advice...

Allan