Digital BW, The Print

Hi,

I have been working with Eboni-6 for about a month on an Epson 1400. 
I 
would like to share some observations and hopefully learn some new 
ideas for using Eboni-6 from other forum members.

The pdfs written by Paul Roark have been an excellent way to learn 
about grayscale inkjet printing, as has searching this forum. So 
thank 
you Paul and members of this forum.

I have found Eboni-6 to produce extremely smooth prints, with good 
blacks and great transitions, especially in the highlights. However, 
the color tones available are the biggest weakness to me. Not in the 
range of tinting available, but rather the greenish tint I find the 
cool inks to 
have. All observation are for PremierArt Hot Press, but I have found 
them to be generally applicable to other papers I have tried.

The warm inks (K, C and LC) are very nice. Prints made using just 
these 
three inks (or just K) in QTR are very nice, but too warm for my 
tastes.

The cool inks (M, LM and Y), however, have an unpleasant greenish 
tint. 
I find this basically rules out the possibility of cool-toned prints. 
The biggest challenge in using Eboni-6 has been to offset the warmth 
of 
K, C and LC without allowing the greenish tint to creep in.

I tried printing from Photoshop, using Color Control gamma 2.2, as 
per 
Paul Roark's suggestion, but found the shadows to have a strong green 
cast (the dMax, contrast and sharpness were excellent though). I 
spent 
many hours tweaking the CMY sliders in the Epson driver, but was 
never 
able to get an acceptable color tonality from shadows to highlights.

I also tried the QTR profiles provided by Paul Roark in message 
#94068, 
but these produced extremely bizarre results.

The best method for me has been to use QTR to produce a warm profile 
(K, C and LC) and a cool profile (K, M, LM and Y). When printing I 
use 
the QTR split blending sliders to mix the profiles. Usually about 70% 
to 80% warm, with more cool inks in the highlights. For example, the 
warm contribution might be [H, M, S] = [65%, 75%, 75%].

I realize the Eboni-6 inkset was probably not intended for split-
toning, but this works quite well for me. I find I can get almost 
neutral to pleasantly warm prints. I can post the QTR curves 
somewhere 
if anyone is interested. I wish I had a spectrometer, in order to 
better communicate these issues, but I only have a scanner, which 
isn't sensitive enough to these small shifts near neutral.

Have others come up with other methods of using Eboni-6? Also, has 
anyone found a paper where the cool inks take on a more bluish tone? 
This would be great, because then cooler images could be made.

I have a question about the inks themselves. I have read on this 
forum 
that carbon pigments are naturally warm. What then makes the cooler 
inks cool?

Best regards,
Tyler Coen