Digital BW, The Print

Hello everybody,

I have been a silent reader of this group for couple of week, so let 
me introduce myself before asking the question. I am form Toronto, 
Canada (although originally from Russia) and have been doing 
photography for the last five years and with strong accent on b&w 
photography for the last two years. I still have to learn many 
things, so all criticism is welcomed. 

Up until a month ago, I was doing all my printing in the lab and now 
I finally got my first printer – Epson 2200. Overall, I am very 
happy with it and have no complaints, except some of the aspects of 
printing bw pictures is still a mystery. Couple of days ago, I tried 
Quadtone RIP, which solved some of my problems (thank you Roy!), I 
am still playing, but there is one thing that has me worried.

It seems, that although my monitor is properly calibrated (no 
problem during color printing) bw prints, come out much darker than 
on the screen and with significantly less contrast. It also seems 
that some of black shifts into dark grey. Because of that my 
workflow currently looks like this:
1.	After output sharpening I bring up contrast +15 and 
brightness +10
2.	Then, using curves, I do a two points cut out of black (to 
preserve black)
3.	After that I do the print using QRIP. I review the print, 
compare it to the screen and mark areas that I have to dodge or burn 
to make the image look like the original screen image.
4.	I proceed with dodging and burning and do another test 
print. Once finished testing, I do the enlargement and finally 
proceed with large print.

It seems to work, but I wonder if there is a good way to simplify 
this by adjusting printer or RIP settings to proper brightness / 
contrast levels.
For additional info, I print on Epson Enhanced Matte paper with UC 
inks. In QRIP I found that Ilford Heavy Paper / UC-EEnchMatte 
combination works best for me.

Thanks!

Alexander Poizner
http://thingsdream.com