Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, johnlill2@y... wrote:
> 
> Since I have upgraded to the new QTR/QTRGui for Windows, my prints 
> are too dark.

Did they look OK if you printed with the old QTR/QTRgui? That's important. If they did, the thing you need to do is run QTRCleanout.exe (from the QTRgui site) then reinstall. Cures all sorts of weird problems.

If this is your first experience with QTR, read on...

> They look great in Photoshop but the whites are just 
> not white in the prints and the overall image is too dark. I am 
> printing on Epson Enhanced Matte using a 60/40 mix of the Warm/Cool 
> curves. I use an Epson 2200 with UltraChrome inks. What do I need to 
> do to correct this?

Give up PhotoShop?

OK, on to a more serious solution.

If QTR is functioning alright, it prints pretty well. It sounds more like you've got PhotoShop and/or your monitor calibrated so PhotoShop is making things brighter than they really are.

First, are you printing monochrome TIF files, or are the TIFs still color, just desaturated or turned into monochrome with the channel mixer? The TIFs really should be monochrome for QTR to work properly.

Open one of the problem images in PhotoShop and select image->mode. Make sure it's "grayscale" not "RGB Color".

Now, PhotoShop uses ICC profiles when displaying an image, QTR does not use the profile embedded in the TIFF when printing the image. So a really weird profile will cause problems. When you convert the image to grayscale, the profile will probably be switched to "Dot Gain 20%". This is pretty much compatible with QTR, i.e. an image that displays well in PhotoShop with "Dot Gain 20%" will look OK after QTR strips the profile and does its thing. If you've got some other profile set, like "Dot Gain 40%" or "Gray Gamma 2.2" you'll have weird tones. This is why you can't have the image in color RGB mode, because even inf the image looks monochrome, the color profiles like "Adobe RGB" or "sRGB" profiles won't match up to QTR at all.

Now, it's possible you simply have your monitor brightness or contrast turned up to high. In the QuadToneRIP directory is a file called "21step.tif". Open it in PhotoShop, the same way you open the problem images. Assign a working space of "Dot Gain 20%" if the option appears. You should be able to see each of the 21 steps as a separate, distinct color. Only the 0% step should be white. The 5% step should definitely be a light gray, distinguishable from the 0% step. The 95% step should be a charcole gray, different from the 100% step, which is the only one that should be black. (The 95% step isn't numbered, but it's the one between 100% and 90%, in case you can't see it).

Hope one of these suggestions helps...