Digital BW, The Print

"I realized that there is no way to have your monitor white match 
your paper white or get your monitor black to match 100% ink 
black on the paper."

Please reread my original post.

Profiling the printer (with ColorVision's ProfilerPLUS or Monaco 
EZ Color) tells the computer how the data in the file will look 
when output on a your printer with a particular combination of 
paper and ink. Setting up and using softproofing in Photoshop 
tells the monitor to ajust its display to match what the printer 
profile indicates the image would look like if it were printed.

The combination of printer profiling and softproofing makes the 
onscreen image match what the print will look like. It works very 
well for me. The monitor needs to be accurately calibrated (with 
a hardware calibrator (again, ColorVision and Monaco are good, 
reasonably priced options) in order to achieve good fidelity. The 
monitor can, indeed, match paper white and ink black - its range 
is far greater than that of paper and ink. A print will never look like 
a nice, bright, contrasty, saturated onscreen image, but the 
onscreen image can be made to resemble the more limited 
range that's possible in a print. That's what softproofing does.

Further, note that my adjustments to the Roark curves have 
nothing to do with screen-to-print matching. I tweaked the curves 
simply to improve my print output. The softproof faithfully 
reflected those tweaks in the onscreen image.

Hope that clarifies a few things.

Jacques Cornell


> As a real newbee to quadtone printing who has just installed 
the MIS 
> VM CFS and trying to use the Roark curves I am just wondering 
how 
> anyone can actually match the luminous screen to actual 
printed 
> output?  After quite a bit of fiddling, I realized that there is no 
> way to have your monitor white match your paper white or get 
your 
> monitor black to match 100% ink black on the paper... then it 
gets 
> into the lustre of the paper etc... seems pretty hopeless.  I was 
> starting to think that the real trick is to get to know your system 
> and develop a mental "transfer function" when interpreting your 
screen 
> image for printing, is this not the case?
> 
> Thanks for any insight,
> 
> Mark
> 
> PS  Thanks again to Paul for his devotion to developing curves 
and 
> supporting the VM inkset, I am very impressed so far and love 
the 
> ability to dial in any tone I wish.
> 
> --- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "jacques10040" 
> <jacques10040@y...> wrote:
> ...I tweaked the Roark curve (softproofing on) to yield a good 
> > onscreen 21-step grayscale, and am getting prints that are a 
very 
> > close match....