Digital BW, The Print

i thought it might be useful to summarize my experiences following my posting and the 
helpful responses i got. in short, my question was: how do i get more vibrant B&W prints 
using greyscale inks?

i learnt the following things that might help other newbies:

1. yes, some quite extreme S-curves are often necessary. as hogarth pointed out, the 
curves adjustment is like selecting a paper grade.

2. getting the monitor to match the print is a huge help. i've not yet managed to borrow 
an eyeone, but paul roark suggested i try his instructions for generating a softproof profile 
by eye (apparently a photoshop hack tyler boley discovered). it worked wonderfully well. 
see: http://home1.gte.net/res09aij/Monitor-Profiling.htm. i found that starting with a 
step wedge and then refining the curve as i found prints with slight anomalies helped. in 
particular, it seems to be easier to set the curve when you have a troublesome print. in my 
case, for example, i was judging tone in a girl's hair, which is much easier than estimating 
the luminance level of big blocks of grey.

3. using this technique, you don't really need to calibrate your monitor, because it's an 
'end to end' adjustment. paul says that the same softproofing profile should do for all his 
curves. as far as i can tell, the only advantages of doing a more serious callibration job (of 
the monitor and also of the printing) would be that (a) if you switched monitors but not 
printers, you could use the old softproofs, and (b) you'd get to see the tone on the screen. 
there's also a minor irritation in the boley-roark scheme for me, which is that i need to 
switch to greyscale to do the curves adjustment, since the softproofs don't work in RGB. 
before, i was staying in RGB -- using channel mixer (in the form of fred miranda's B&W 
Pro) to convert to monochrome, and then applied the roark curves directly. now i have to 
switch to greyscale and back again. i hope there's no information loss there.

kudos to paul roark and MIS. the UT7 inks are just fantastic. i'm using 
EEM and PhotoRag, and the results are far better than i ever managed to get with epson 
inks.

many thanks also to all those who responded: ben, andre, hogarth, steve, benjamin and 
tim. 

/daniel