Digital BW, The Print

Hello Walt,

>You did not say if your monitor is hardware calibrated and to 
>what settings.

I haven't done any calibration, but it's brightness and contrast are
set so that I can always see all the steps on web sites that show
grayscale steps with warnings to make sure they can all be seen.


>I went to the "lighter" setting in the Epson driver because it opens 
>up the shadow areas very nicely (as compared to any of the other 
>settings) and the correspondence (in terms of *spacing* or 
>linearization) to a step wedge (screen to print) is quite good.  

Ok, that's good to know.  I guess I stumbled on it by accident, just
looking for a density match to my old proof prints.


>This however leaves the screen image darker than the print in 
>terms of overall density; and the coorespondence in shadow 
>separation is not exact.  A dot gain workspace would, of course, 
>only agggravate this problem.

Are you sure?  If the image is too dark then try changing the front
end profile to DG15 and try that.  Just keep going down in DG value
(the screen gets lighter) until you find the best match. I found 15 to
be too light and 20 to be too dark for most images, so I made a custom
DG18 curve and it works very well.  As for matching the contrast,
these curves don't have to be simple 1-point density curves.  Why not
make an s-curve or whatever it needs to match the screen to the print
and set that as the default profile?.  It will automatically be
assigned to every grayscale image.  Seems like it would be essentially
what you're doing already, but without a manual curve on the image to
be turning on and off all the time.  


 
>So I end up, like you, using a curve at the top of the file.  I am 
>simply using mine to match the screen view to the print (and I turn 
>it off for printing) and I then use a curve to get what I want on 
>the screen (which I do not turn off to print). 

This all sounds terribly inefficient. If the custom profile idea would
work it would probably save time and peace of mind.



>You are using your curve to match the print to the screen view 
>(or to previous prints on the smaller printer or BO).  

Ummm, not exactly.  The screen view is already a good match to the
proof, so I'm not concerned with that any more.  I'm using the curve
to make the K3 print match the BO final proof print.  The proof is the
goal - it is how I want any other prints to look (in terms of density
and contrast).  Once the proof is done, it becomes the model for any
other prints made, regardless of paper, tone, printer or ink set.   


>What I'd like is a system that did not require this "special" 
>curves layer for each file (the screen matching one in my case), 
>and I have no need to match to a different printer or print.

I think the custom profile idea is the best bet.  I really think it's
worth a try and its easy to do.  

 
Regards,
Clayton


Info on black and white digital printing at    
http://www.cjcom.net/digiprnarts.htm