Digital BW, The Print

Most discussion here revolves around getting your grayscale images to print
on your inkjet printer with your own personal tones -- warm/cool/sepia/split
or the latest idea matching Lenswork printing.

But once you do that, what about showing or reproducing those tones other than
in your prints.  I.e.  wouldn't it be nice to have your web site show the actual tone
of your prints.   Or how about making postcards that match your prints.

Naturally you can convert to RGB and experiment till you get something close.
But Color Management and ICC profiles can do all this for you automatically.
I've recently been printing with my own custom split-tone curves and wanted to
make some cards.   The card printer wants CMYK separations for printing.   In the
past to be on the safe side I just shipped them CYMK's that were just K ink so
they were just one ink printing.  The results were fine but not special.
Well now they provide full CMYK profiles of their printer and in fact have one that
has maximum GCR conversion -- i.e. minimum color inks.   This of course has
been the method we're all using on inkjets.  So I figured this was all worth a try.

Naturally I print with QTR and have my custom profiles.  I also create custom ICCs
for soft-proofing in Photoshop, so I can see the exact color of the prints of the
display.   Well its easy to convert the color to RGB or CMYK.

Simply - Convert to Profile from grayscale to the custom QTR gray ICC profile.
This will now look exactly like your soft-proof.  Note that it's still a grayscale
file but it has color.  Use the Eye-Dropper and see LAB values.

Now you can Convert to AdobeRGB or sRGB and maintain the colors on the web.

In my case I Converted to the printer's CMYK profile.  Color has been maintained
thoughout the whole process.   I sent the CMYK files in and the cards came back
a great match to the tone of the actual prints.

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The talk recently about matching Lenswork tones is also easy to do.  Measure a
few points in the magazine, or for that matter make up LAB values that you'd
like to match.   For instance take these LAB values that Paul posted.  Here they are:

9    0.9  0.7
27  2.1  3.3
40  2.4  4.2
53  2.4  3.3
75  2.0  1.6
93  1.2  -1.5
 
Just put them into a text file and drop it on QTR-Create-ICC.  You now have an ICC
profile that can be used like above.  The two Convert-to-Profiles will tone any
grayscale image in any desired way.

Roy