Digital BW, The Print

With all due respect to Bill, David you have a ways to go before you try
doing your own curves.  The canned curves should produce a reasonable image
out-of-the-box.  I doubt you would notice too much difference if you did
your own linearization which requires a densimeter or photospectrometer.
Work through the dialogue we have given you so far and try to get your
workflow setup correctly.  And try to get your monitor calibrated.  The
proofing workflow I described is correct and you can preview both QTR and
Epson output.  The QTR print driver settings are really very easy and
shouldn't require a lot of fussing with (1440 super, better, ordered dither,
mix 65% cool/35% warm for "roughly neutral", matte paper).  The only other
thing you need concern yourself with is the profile conversion which is
important.  In the same way that you do a profile conversion on the fly with
the Epson driver (from Adobe RGB to your Enhanced Matte paper profile) you
need to do it with QTR - it's just that you must do it manually with PC QTR.

With BOTH the Epson driver and QTR you will see the reduction in dynamic
range associated with printing to matte paper.  This is nothing to do with
the driver per se but to do with the fact that the greyscale that can be
represented on your screen exceeds significantly the greyscale that can be
printed on matte paper.  Do the two softproofs as I said and see that they
have roughly the same impact on an image.  BOTH ways of printing require a
little addition of contrast via a curve to make up for the matte paper.
Much less if any is required for printing to photo paper.


> From: Bill Cheadle <wpcheadle@...>
> 
> 
> 
> David,
> 
> Have you read "Making Curves for QuadToneRip - A Tutorial"?  This
> document is available for download from the page where QTR is
> downloaded. It goes into great detail on all the variables as well as
> linearization.
> 
> Once you have a linearized/optimized curve, you can take a look at what
> you're outputting vs what you think you seen on your monitor. If
> converting to Gray Matte space, for example,"flattens" your image, try
> applying an S curve to punch it up a bit, just as you would with a color
> image.
> 
> I've been using QTR since it was released for WXP, and through a lot of
> T&E have produced B&W images with no  color casts that are equal, and
> some superior, to anything I ever produced from a wet  process. But like
> everything else, it does take some tweaking to get it where you
> ultimately want it to be.