Digital BW, The Print

Steve Kale wrote:

>Many many people, I suspect though, still have a "no colour management"
>workflow for B&W and hence the issue of aligning the workspace to the
>printer output is a relevant issue.  I've made no secret of my belief that
>Roy's program for generating a greyscale profile could be expanded greatly
>in its application, eg to those using a black only workflow.
>
>  
>
Possibly though I have some doubts about the consistency of black only 
printing. Dotgain due to humidity and other changes in time has more 
impact on black only than on partitioned greys.  This doesn't get better 
with smaller droplets favored by black only users. More linearisations 
needed in time.

A greyscale CM workflow is possible right now, there still will be some 
flaws in it like you have mentioned but in essence it is there.

I tried to get Grey Lab added to Vuescan as a greyscale choice but 
didn't succeed. It doesn't matter much as selecting AdobeRGB will attach 
2.2 G  to the 16 bit greyscale file that I save. Converting that to Grey 
Lab in PS doesn't shift much. With the Colorsync discussion in mind it 
may be better to have 2.46 G in Vuescan, especially when the dynamic 
range in the film is wide and the scanner (+ long exposure) is able to 
reach that. Considering that Vuescan does a good job in B&W scanning I 
do not see a reason to have a RAW-RGB output. The histogram is there for 
the decisions. Keeping 2.2 or 2.4 Gamma in PS + saving the file with one 
of them is good. I save the files now from PS as 16 bit greyscale + Grey 
Lab attached. Though I use Qimage>QTR for printing I do not use CM for 
greyscale in Qimage but do a P2P in PS before using Qimage>QTR. I do not 
trust Qimage on that aspect. For color it is alright though. The only 
point where the greyscale file becomes an RGB file is as output from 
Qimage but QTR takes care of that. This limits the size of my files and 
the speed of processing. Of course it will be the same with 2.2 Gamma 
attached. Selecting AdobeRGB for color and 2.2 G for greyscale gives a 
more uniform approach and conversions between RGB and greyscale make it 
an obvious choice. I did that before Grey Lab appeared.

I do wonder whether the two = Matte and Gloss printer profiles are 
enough considering the Dmax possible in gloss with the 4800 and some 
paper choices in between (lustre, satin). A bit more fine tuning on the 
printer profiles like you proposed and adding another choice as a next 
step ?

Ernst