Digital BW, The Print

Roy, thanks for the response.  I agree that soft proofing works well.  The
interesting thing is that I tend to work on an image without it and then
turn it on when it comes to printing.  I then find a curve that I think best
turns the image back to how it looked with proofing off (the premise being I
might want to print to different media) which is inherently a little hit and
miss.  Still can¹t help thinking that this undoes something that was done
before.  I was wondering if there was a sort of gamut compression factor
(lay man¹s terms) going on.  That is, if the monitor can represent a scale
of 0 to 100 whereas say the printer can only produce 10 to 80 (paper not
being perfect white and the inks not being able to get perfect black). (The
10 and the 80 are measured as part of the linearisation process.)  If the
driver, curves and linearisation process then mapped 0 to 10 and 100 to 80
and all else in between proportionately then there would be quite a tonal
shift.  A pixel originally at 75 would get thumped down to 65.  This would
all cause an image to trend to mid gray and print a lot lighter.  What I
think we would prefer to have happen is that the 75 stays at 75 and an 85
pixel simply hits the max of 80.  Just thinking out loud....


From: "Roy Harrington" <roy@...>

Hi Steve,

I'm not sure I can give you much theory behind it all.   I mostly go by
whatever
looks and works the best.  I've always been surprised by how poor a simple
21step looks on a well profiled monitor.   On the other hand the softproofed
21step has much nicer separation everywhere and matches the print too.
On the Piezo website the rollovers that show their softproofing exhibit the
same dramatic tonal difference.  I don't know why but softproofing is so
good
as far as I'm concerned that I just use it all the time.

I would think "simulate paper white" would be correct, too.  But again by
trying
both it just doesn't look as good.  With EEM the highlights look way to
blue.
So I leave paper white and ink black off.

Roy




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