Digital BW, The Print

Hello list,
 
I know that replying to my own post it's probably bad netiquette, but my
questions went unanswered and I don't give up easily :-)
I actually tried to practice what I preached, and started out by creating a
duotone set in Photoshop with black and the usual three shades of gray (25%,
50% and 75%). I wrote the 4 corresponding curves so that:
 
1) The 4 grays were (mostly) separated.
2) Changing the image mode from grayscale to duotone using this set has no
visible effect (I used a 21-step grayscale to check this).
 
Then I wrote another duotone set using the same curves but replacing the
three grays with 100% Cyan, Yellow and Magenta, hoping to have the printer
driver replicate the behavior of the gray set (i.e., output the same B&W
image I saw on the screen and separating inks).
The funny part of it is that I'm OUT OF INKS (argh!) and therefore can't
print to see whether I completely wasted my time or not. I think it may
(should?) work, yet the color image I get when I apply my CMYK quadtone set
is very different from the one I get when applying Brandin curves, and that
is not encouraging.
This workflow would obviously work only for 4-inks printers, but has the
advantage of being WYSIWYG and being independent from the ink positioning,
since you can switch the CMY curves accordingly.
Any advice? Anyone wishing to give it a try and let me know while I wait for
MIS to have Full Spectrum cartridges available? I could easily send the
quadtone settings (maybe off-list).
 
Alessandro Pardi
 
 -----Original Message-----
From: Alessandro Pardi [mailto:alessandro.pardi@...]
Sent: giovedì 4 ottobre 2001 18.51
To: 'DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com'
Subject: [Digital BW] WYSIWYG separation curves (Was: Ink Color Equal To
It's Shade Cou nterpart part 2)



 <snip>
Do you think that using a quadtone set with
CMYK colors (i.e. picking black, cyan, magenta and yellow as the 4 colors
that compose the image) has any chance to actually result in the curves
defined for each color being used for the correspondent inks by the printer
driver?
If the answer to my last question is yes, this would provide a way to write
WYSIWYG separation curves, although only for 4 ink printers, with the
following steps:
1) Write separation curves using a CMYK quadtone set in Photoshop. These
will be used for printing.
2) Create another quadtone set with exactly the same separation curves, but
using black and 25%, 50% and 75% gray. Once you have a satisfying image with
this quadtone, apply quadtone 1 and print.

Am I dreaming?




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