Digital BW, The Print

Ok, so I'm back after a brief hiatus.  This time, I'm armed with a delicious new iMac.  I 
finally made the switch, and I'm not looking back.

So while eagerly anticipating Paul's UT7 inkset, I've dusted off my Ultrachrome carts and 
have been using the stock (Schofield?) curves through QTR to get some nicely neutral 
prints.  The dmax is a little south of where I'd like to to be, so I got to thinking.

I printed and scanned back in the greyscale ramp that came with QTR, and sure enough, 
the histogram is pretty compressed from about 80-100%, and the black point never quite 
gets down to 0.  I'm not sure how to get more black out of the UC inkset, and I was 
wondering if there was a way (preferably automated) that I could take the difference 
between the original curve image and the scan, and turn it into a photoshop curve.  I'm 
new to building curves, and I see how they can be labor intensive.  I have no problem 
doing it the hard way, but can't help but wonder if there is a smarter way to do it.

The next step would be creating a curve for QTR from this photoshop curve.  I assume I 
would be adding the 2 curves together, but I'm not really sure how to do that.  I don't 
really grok how to make the leap from a monochrome curve to seperated CMYK values.  
Are they just mixed evenly?  I guess this is more properly done with a densitometer, but I 
don't have one availabe, and I figured that an accurate scan would suffice.

How far off am I on understanding this?