Digital BW, The Print

Have you setup a soft proof to Gray Matte Paper with perceptual rendering
and black point compensation checked and simulate ink black checked?  Simply
put, there is no way for even the Epson driver to "match the display" unless
you are looking at a good soft proof.  The dynamic range of matte paper
simply isn't wide enough.

A couple of other points.  Leaving a greyscale image in Adobe RGB doesn't
make a lot of sense to me.  You just use 3x the disk space.  This was the
rationale behind QTR Grey Lab - it is Lab but with the a and b channels
discarded because they are unnecessary for B&W.  But be that as it may.

With the ICC profile-based soft proof you should then get a very good match
(assuming your monitor is properly profiled) to the QTR print. I use a Mac
and so the QTR print stage is a lot easier for me - I simply print from PS
with an on the fly conversion from my workspace (QTR Grey Lab) to my print
space (QTR Matte/Photo paper) - much in the same way that you do with colour
work.  With the PC version of QTR you need to manually do the conversion
from your "master" image to the "print" image and save this version for
print. Make sure that when you do the conversion you use Perceptual Intent
and Use Black Point Compensation.

If you are not getting a good match to your screen then either the display
isn't calibrated and being used by PS properly or there is a problem at the
printer end.  I assume you have left all the other QTR settings untouched -
ink limit and gamma etc.  What inks are you using?  (Sorry if you have
mentioned this before).


> From: davidpichevin <davidpichevin@...>
> Reply-To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
> Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 00:49:57 -0000
> To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
> Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Quadtone RIP Faded print
> 
> 
> 
> Diane,
> 
> As I mentioned in my first post, I am comparing the QTR prints to a
> Photoshop print I first made. The PS print comes out as it is on
> screen (there's just a tad less contrast but it's the same for my
> color print as well and not important, CRT versus matte paper...).
> It's the same as on screen except for the metamerism. Without that
> phenomenon I'd be very happy with the print.
> 
> It was printed from an Adobe RGB space picture.
> 
> Something bugs me in what you are saying though. You say that you
> converted to LAB then converted to Gray matte. I am not sure that the
> 2 steps conversion is useful. You can very well convert directly to
> the grey matte and it sholdn't make a difference (actually in theory
> some quality gets lost during a profile conversion so you don't want
> to have too many of them).
> 
> But in anycase, yeah, the PS print is equal to the on-screen result
> but with metamerism.
>