Digital BW, The Print

Hi Paul


> From: Paul Roark <paul.roark@...>
 
> The glop is not totally transparent.  It has some density.  As such, the
> highlights will be dulled by it.  In my curves I put very little if any glop
> in the highlights. I don't want the highlights dulled.

Agreed.  I should have said that I tell QTR to put zero glop where there is
no other ink.  All else is 15%.  Note though that a 15% coating on RC paper
is very difficult to see without tilting the paper and looking at the sheen
rather than straight at the colour of the paper.  I doubt highlights are
affected too much.  Maybe MIS' glop II will be clearer.

> 
> I find that a curved that tailors the glop to the bronzing pattern allows me
> to deal with the highlight issues while still pouring glop on where the
> bronzing is worst.

Yes and as you know I have been playing with the same (with help from both
you and Carl).  I did the "straight" 15% as a first test for colour.   For
colour it is a little more complex to do a toner or grey scale adjusted glop
application because you are sending QTR an RGB file which gets converted to
grey scale on the fly by OS-X at standard/default weightings.  At any rate
bronzing is less of an issue and gone with a straight coat.

I was thinking of exploring a grey scale adjusted overcoat for B&W.

> 
> The ideal might be a perfectly registered overcoat, but that is not very
> realistic with these printers.  Even a fuzzy mask is going to probably be
> hitting the spectral highlights.

Rolling an image through the printer twice is not really a hassle.  Just
takes a little longer.  If all you are doing is B&W then the glop can sit in
the LK slot the whole time depending on your setup.  With colour I need to
switch out the light black and do a couple of head cleans.

Anyway food for thought.  I was just noting the dMax effect.  I wonder what
it will do with PKN3.  With MISPK and Luster I got a 10% density increase
(from 2.0 to 2.22) albeit with the initial ink laid down by the Epson driver
rather than QTR which I would use for B&W. That's quite a bump.
Unfortunately I did not note the figures for EPGS and Ilford Smooth Pearl as
I was doing my calibration.  I did EPL last and had already coated the EPSG
and ISP sheets, seen the increase and then decided to record the change for
EPL.

This is all from colour test charts and images (except for my observation
that running glop into 100% black during ink lay down actually reduced dMax
by several L points.)  I am off to New Zealand tomorrow for a week and so
won't be able to play with this stuff some more for a while but I am
interested to see the differences of printing a B&W image without glop,
letting it dry and then over-coating glop on a greyscale adjusted basis.  I
suspect you may end up with the best of all worlds: no at print dMax drop
from glop, a recovery of the dMax loss from drying (remember our
conversation about sheen and spray), a more even sheen, and a big hit to
bronzing.

Cheers

Steve