Digital BW, The Print

Hi Chip,

The idea with the four profiles is to span the tones that different people
will like.  The way I like to think about it is the "warm" curve is pure carbon
pigment and the center of the tones.  Cool goes off toward the cold tone
direction, CoolSe is similar but with a hint more magenta, Sepia is
way off in the very warm direction.  It a little like the ImagePrint tone
picker but the end points are more oriented to desirable tones.

Anyway, you should be doing Blending of two profiles to pick tones that
are between two extremes.   Neutral is somewhat in the eye of the
holder so you should definitely experiment to get what you like.  My
preferences are about 70 to 85% coolse or cool blended with warm.
This gets it just a touch on the warmish side of neutral.

Another important consideration is which paper you use, EEM is quite
cold, Photo Rag near neutral and UltraSmooth is warm.  In general the
highlights are dominated by the paper tone and the midtones are
dominated by the ink/profile tone.  So my ideal is to lean the profile
tone in the same direction as the paper tone -- cooler with cool paper
and warmer with warm paper.  

Roy

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "chipcarterdc" 
<chipcarterdc@h...> wrote:
> Just started running Roy Harrington's QuadTone RIP 2.0 (QTR) on my 9600 
> and am pretty impressed thus far.  However, when looking at the curve 
> choices, I noticed that you have the following tone choices:  Sepia, Cool, 
> CoolSe (Selenium, I assume) and Warm.  None of these is labeled "neutral", 
> and that is accurate.  I quite like the CoolSe curve, and will likely continue 
> using that.  But it is not "neutral" -- it has the look of a lightly selenium toned 
> print.  The "Cool" curve, as its name indicates, isn't "neutral" either -- it's got 
> the look of a cool tone wet darkroom paper.
> 
> What I'm wondering is if anyone has come up with a QTR custom curve that 
> produces a neutral grayscale print?  (By the way, I'm making my judgments on 
> neutrality by holding the prints next to a wet darkroom print of the same image 
> on Ilford Multigrade).  Or a combination of curves via the QTR blending option 
> that produces neutral grayscale prints?  I'll reiterate that I quite like the CoolSe 
> curve, but there are times (like in the wet darkroom) where I won't want the 
> slight purplishness of a selenium toned print.  This is not at all to bash QTR, 
> but ImagePrint, for example, when the Tint Picker is set to neutral, produces a 
> print that is a bit cooler than the QTR CoolSe selection, yet without the coldish 
> tone of QTR's Cool selection, and therefore closer to what I consider "neutral."  
> I'm assuming that the same thing is possible with QTR's ability to create or 
> blend curves, but if someone else has figured it out, I'd appreciate the benefit 
> of your experience.
> 
> (All prints mentioned above were on Epson Enhanced Matte -- if the inherent 
> tone of the paper has a significant impact on what I'm seeing (e.g., with 
> Ultrasmooth, the CoolSe curve looks significantly different), please let me 
> know)
> 
> By the way: regardless of whether I ultimately stick with QTR, I'll be sending 
> Roy the $50 shareware fee as soon as I get a chance -- it's an amazing piece 
> of work that those of us with the $ to do so should support.