Digital BW, The Print

> I hope someone, ideally Roy I guess, will add a sort of sidebar or 
> box on the options for measuring density well enough to exploit
QTR. 
> When Roy started QTR, I had the impression that to do it well would 
> require something I wouldn't otherwise need and would be expensive. 
> But even if that was true then, I'm not sure it would be now.
>

With regard to QTR...

There are a an ever-increasing number of ink curves now, so you don't
necessarily need a 
densitometer. I ended up buying an eye-one, but before that I used an
Xrite 810. I have 
compared  my results and the 810 is fine. You have to manually type
in your readings, but 
otherwise it works fine. The 810 was $117 on ebay. Before that I used
my scanner (Epson 
3200) to estimate the relative densities of the inks for QTR. That
was a little trickier but in 
practice it worked just fine and I made good prints with a previously
unsupported printer 
(a 980) without any real difficulty. 

The eye-one lets you easily make a very very good softproof that
includes the color cast of 
the paper-ink combination. Before that I just used a dot-gain curve
calculated from 810 
measurements. Sure, it was not as good, but more than adequate.
Before that I used a 
scanner  and photoshop to make the curves. A bit more twiddling, but
I had very a decent 
softproof made with a dotgain curve in PS.   

> 
> >Soft proofing and printing are both handled in Photoshop with QTR 
> >whereas a separate program (OPM) is used for both printing and 
> >softproofing profiles made with IJC.  Both handle profile blending 
> >in a similar manner,
> >but softproofing the blends is more easily accomplished within the 
> >print preview window of OPM.  On the other hand, the use of
standard 
> >icc softproof profiles allows more accurate proofing as well as 
> >image editing within Photoshop with QTR profiles.
> 
> Probably I should upgrade Photoshop to CS anyway, but I'm still 
> curious to know whether PS 7 - I assume not 6? - is good enough to 
> make the most of QTR?
> 

I have used PS 6 and 7, but mostly just 7. I have not upgraded to CS.
They both worked 
fine.
 
> And speaking of softproofing, I assume QTR and IJC require an
equally 
> good monitor/display and adjustment of it? But again I wonder which 
> options are now thought good enough to exploit the software to best 
> effect.

To set up the dot gain using PS, you mostly end up matching a print
and the screen image 
that produced it. So even if the monitor is not perfectly calibrated
you can make a usable 
closed-loop system, meaning that you are at least seeing what you
print. What you lose is 
that your files won't print for someone else very well. 
Theoretically, this should be less of 
an issue if using the spectro-measured approach, but is not necessary.

What I have found to be really nice with QTR is that it is a very
well layed-out minimal 
system that is very straightforward. You need only a minimal
understanding to get great 
prints. Almost none if there are ink curves ready for your
printer-ink-paper combo. 

But the real beauty is that you can control the ink lay down for each
channel and do 
whatever you want to or need. If you are willing to do a little bit
under the hood work, you 
can do all sorts of nice things quite easily. It took me about an
hour while watching TV to 
totally change the way the toner was being applied. I have a
nonstandard inkset to 
minimize costs and swapping between color and BW.  I decided that I
wanted the LM and 
LC inks to be laid down as a function of the density of all of three
grays, but not the black. 
So, a few additions in one script and voila, great toning. You don't
need to be a computer 
wiz, nor an imaging expert to figure it out either - hey its not
color ;-).

Costa Colbert