Digital BW, The Print

Steve-

I read your last post and found it both intellligible and correct in 
my understanding and believe it is an understanding that would be 
useful to any kind of workflow.  I wanted to clarify a few points 
that I think got lost in the shuffle.

1.  The first is that Epson actually does recommend a DG20 gray 
space.  In a document from their U.S. website called "Epson Color-
Managed Workflow: Getting the Color you Expect in Your Prints," the 
first page recommends (and shows a screen shot) of the color settings 
dialogue.  The setting is U.S. Prepress Defaults, which is an RGB 
space of Adobe RGB (1998) and a gray space of Dot Gain 20%.  The 
document implies that it is for "color" workflow and based on "The 
Epson Stylus Photo 2200 printer . . . but the workflow is similar for 
other printers."  When I questioned this with an Epson tech rep (back 
in April), he confirmed that the expected working gray space on thwe 
2400 was indeed DG 20.

2.  In a post to Clayton earlier on in the fray, I mentioned that I 
used the Gamma 2.2 workspace but the "light" setting in the driver 
because I got better ICC profiles.  (By using the light setting one 
is doing nothing more than changing the color space of the printer in 
an easy, reliable, repeatable, consistent way).  The reason for my 
doing this is that the *unmanaged* targets printed for ICC profiles 
reflect exactly the compression we'd expect of GG 2.2.  In the 
shadows, the closeness of the patches is more difficult for the 
spectro to discriminate.  In some recent tests with Paul (in which we 
measured our own targets five times and then each others, each with a 
different instrument and in my case in both patch and strip mode) 
variations on the order of L* 0.5 were quite common, and I showed one 
as high as L* 0.88.  Thus the target from the light setting makes 
these errors much less significant and provides more reliable data as 
a basis for the ICC profile generation.  Having better resolution of 
the data at this level and then recompressing the 85-100 K for visual 
correctness is, I think, more reliable.  So, the issue is not that 
the target doesn't "look right," it is that the "darker" target is 
more difficult to reliably read.  Incidentally, we both found that 
the variations from the printer (target to target, printed 
consecutively) were greater on my 4800 and Paul's 180 (?) than were 
the variations in spectro reads.

All of that said, the magic of the QTR Create ICC has recently made 
itself known to me again.  I have several photographs I am having to 
reprint.  These were originally printed with a DG20 workspace to the 
2400 using a workflow similar to Clayton's current one.  In 
reprinting them now to the 4800, I am simply converting to the GG 2.2 
profile and printing through the ICC printer profile.  The new prints 
(on a different paper than the originals) are essentially identical 
to the old ones; different file, different printer, different paper, 
but the same output.  One can't beat that for a reliable, flexible 
workflow.  

Best,
Walt