Digital BW, The Print

Ernst - thanks for your reply.  My workflow matches yours exactly,
except that I needed to know what grayspace the scanned image from
Vuescan was in.  GG2.2 is it.

John - I am suprised that Qimage had a "destructive" effect.  What
settings are you using?

It should be easily possible to turn off Qimage's automatic
sharpening.  One of the issues with sharpening in Qimage is that there
a number of places it can be done.  The most useful IMHO is the
"sharpening equaliser", but this only works for colour images.  With
B&W, you are limited to USM and final print smart sharpening.  I am
inclined to agree that this lacks the finesse of something like
Focalblade in PSCS2.  Certainly for my negative scan I sharpened using
Focalblade and then applied a small amount of final print smart
sharpening.  For images from a digital camera, final print smart
sharpening seems adequate.

For me the big advantage of Qimage is not having to save resized
copies of images for printing.  I can print directly from master
images.  However this benefit is offset by the fact that the colour
managment engine in Qimage does not deal at all well with the QTR
profiles.  Thus for B&W images I save a master, plus a copy of the
master in QTR-gray-matte.

F_P