Digital BW, The Print

Keith,

You wrote:

>... Profiling could serve a use in the following way...

>Supposing when doing the 1270/870 curves Dave FIRST profiles
>the ink and media...

>Then writes new transfer curves USING that profile...

>...

>Instead of creating newly tweaked curves for each and every paper, one
>could potentially simply profile the paper and then print via Paul's
>Curves..

>...

My original hope was that people could do paper profiles as Transfer
Functions to be applied after the usual variable-tone curve was applied.  I
did a rough one for Somerset Enhanced, for example.

I never envisioned everyone tweaking the curves.

I think the primary failure of the vm approach is that there has been no
pooling of such profiles, which I anticipated would happen.  Admittedly, the
transfer function tool is crude, which could be part of the problem.
However, I thought that doing rough profiles by just printing a 21-step test
file and correcting for the amount by which the steps are off would be easy
enough that people would just do it manually.

I have no experience with profiling software.  (In the minor color printing
I've done, the profiling software did such a bad job, I found manual tools
more useful.)  However, if some of that software could, even indirectly,
help write curves to be used to profile the vm and Epson FS printing curves,
that would be a big contribution to the effort.

One thing I think I've heard at least indirectly from a couple of posts is
that profiling software needs the driver color controls set to "no color
adjustment."  Is this true?

Between the possibility that the curves are cross-platform with that setting
and the possibility that profiling software may work better with "no color
adjustment" checked, I've started to write curves using that setting.  (The
sliders don't seem to work very well with the hextone printers anyway.)  If
there are other settings that are needed for profiling software to be useful
with the Epson driver, partitioned workflows, let me know, and I'll start to
incorporate those in the future curves I write.

Paul
http://www.PaulRoark.com

One other thought that won't really help the hextone effort, but, is 
there any reason NOT to do actual quadtone curves with the quad inks?   
If each of the 4 positions in the quad were occupied by a discrete ink 
color is there any reason to believe that PhotoShop would then use those 
ink values to properly repro an image with an applied quadtone curve...?

Admittedly, this is beyond my own base of knowledge...

However, if duotones and quadtones have served pre-press for eons.. why 
not use that for the quadtone inksets and simply profile media to match...?

If it worked, some compromise of the method might be feasible with the 
hextones..

Keith

Paul Roark wrote:

>
> One thing I think I've heard at least indirectly from a couple of posts is
> that profiling software needs the driver color controls set to "no color
> adjustment."  Is this true?

YES.. definitely...  Most of the drivers do adjustment of their own to 
some extent, if you don't use "no adjustment" you have multiple 
adjustments of the color space going on... Effectively you will end up 
with the smallest subset of the overlapping color spaces... not to 
mention other problems if you don't kill the driver's color 
correction/adjustment..

Once you do have a proper profile, you leave everything to "no 
adjustment" and print to the profile as the "print color space"

>
> Between the possibility that the curves are cross-platform with that 
> setting
> and the possibility that profiling software may work better with "no color
> adjustment" checked, I've started to write curves using that setting.  
> (The
> sliders don't seem to work very well with the hextone printers 
> anyway.)  If
> there are other settings that are needed for profiling software to be 
> useful
> with the Epson driver, partitioned workflows, let me know, and I'll 
> start to
> incorporate those in the future curves I write.

I'd say go with the following for the most generic results with the 
1270/870 driver:

Photo Paper

1440 DPI

High Quality Halftoning

No Color Adjustment

High Speed OFF



Keith