Just tried it (having found the magazine on the newsstand) - interestingly
the most neutral B&W print from the 2200 so far - slightly metamerisitic (a
very very light magentaish under tungsten) on enhanced matte.
> There are two parts to this. First of all, the author is recommending
> conversion to B&W by desaturation. This is the minimal way to do the
> conversion, and loses all the nice control that is available by using the
> channel mixer, a grayscale proof setup, or the layers technique recently
> mentioned.
No he isn't - he's assuming it's already an B&W/greyscale image, which you
already have as an RGB - I think the desaturation is in order to ensure
there is actually no residual colour tint in the image. Not sure if it's
actually needed though
> Second of all, the author is recommending setting the print space to
> ColorMatch RGB. Since the image is B&W, the color gamut of the profile is
> irrelevant, so the only thing that is significant about this is that this
> tells Photoshop that the printer has a gamma of 1.8. If this
> works, then it
> means that with the driver set the way he suggests, the printer
> has a gamma
> of 1.8.
> However, my 2200 driver has no Automatic setting, in either the Basic or
> Advanced mode.
He's actually using the older driver - in the newer one, just set it as
Colour Management>Colour Controls> standard with your paper settings on he
other side
> What ought to work would be to go into the Advanced mode,
> select Color Controls, set Gamma to 1.8, leave Color Mode on Standard, and
> leave the sliders at zero. Of course, you could do the same thing
> by telling
> PS that the print space is Adobe RGB and selecting a gamma of 2.2 in the
> driver.
However, that doesn't work - or at least it certainly doesn't give as
neutral a print as this - selecting Colourmatch as opposed to Adobe RGB does
seem to give a much more neutral print. I'm guessing that even though the
image is a B&W one, because it's in an RGB colour space, the Colourmatch
space is reducing the gamut of those areas of the space which in Adobe RGB
are rendered by the printer drive as a green or blue tint. Or something like
that...
>
> None of this is particularly unconventional. However, it assumes that the
> printer driver, with Color Controls (if that's what he meant by Automatic)
> selected, is accurately represented, at least for B&W, by a
> simple gamma 1.8
> (or 2.2) curve. Maybe it is. But the 2200 also comes with a set of actual
> ICC profiles, for each standard paper/ink combo, that probably
> describe the
> printer even more accurately. So while there's no harm in testing
> anything,
> I'd guess that using a real profile (instead of just assuming
> Colormatch RGB
> or Adobe RGB) has a better chance of providing accurate results.
Not to date it doesn't - none of them gives anywhere near a decent greyscale
print. The Epson (and most other profiles) are garbage for greyscale
printing. This definitely gives a print that's more neutral than fiddling
around for hours with the Epson greyscale balancer. It's certainly not
perfect, but without a RIP, it's about the best I've seen to date
Tim