QTR-Quadtone RIP

Color Management sure has gotten to be a mysterious thing.
Conceptually its not that complicated
but in practice its hard to know who's doing what.  In general there
are 3 main players -- the application
(photoshop, lightroom, qtr-print-tool, or something else), the
operating system OSX (colorsync is apple's
CMS) and finally the driver (Epson driver or QTR driver for B&W).
Unfortunately they all want to get into
the act -- but you need just exactly one to do the actual CM conversion.

The concept is to print out a target with no color management
happening, measure it and create a profile.
Then from then on print just introducing this profile into the print
workflow.  The important thing though is
that all the settings while printing have to be IDENTICAL to those
that were used when printing the original target.
The problems arise -- if you use different print settings, if you
print with different apps maybe they do
different things, if you print with a different OS maybe something's
different, if you have a different driver
version they may have changed something.  Not that all these things
are likely a problem but sometimes
they are.

In practice usually it depends on where you got the profile.  Epson
profiles for Epson papers for a specific
driver tend to work pretty well.  Downloaded profiles from
someone/paper manufacturer are harder to
know how they were made.  My case for a custom paper showed one
printer's profiles too light and one
too dark. Making my own fixed with Print-Tool made both printers work
just fine.  The important thing
is to always use OSX Print Presets to make sure you have consistent
settings.  CS6 is particularly tricky
here because there are settings in the Preset and settings stored with
the image.  Make them all the same.
Most of the settings show up on the Print Settings print dialog pane
but the Color Matching pane can
also be important.  CS6 Manages Color will force Color Matching to
ColorSync so if you want Print-Tool the same you
should check this and make it ColorSync as well.  If you have a
working setup its hard to give a guaranteed
answer -- try various ways to see what works.

Roy

On Sun, Nov 11, 2012 at 10:28 AM, Eric Brody <brodyer@...> wrote:
> If I'm understanding Nick correctly, my "too light" color prints with the QTR tool will require me to re-profile my monitor with my X-Rite Eye-One Display 2 device. It would seem that to match the prints from the QTR tool, I'll need to brighten my monitor significantly  to get it to match the prints from the QTR tool?
>
> I'd love to know how the PS printing "double profiles" the process. I also wonder, as did Jim Stewart, whether I'll need all new color profiles. For my limited color printing, I've always used the canned profiles from the paper manufacturers, and have been pleased with the results. For black and white, of course, I use the QTR profiles.
>
> Nick was kind enough to make a QTR neutral profile for me for Canson Platine Fiber Rag, a lovely paper albeit expensive. Embarrassingly I did not realize, I'll need warm and sepia ones as well to use multiple curves. Sorry Nick, I've been meaning to send you a heartfelt thanks you note as well as asking if you'll make a couple of more curves.
>
> Printing is an amazing world.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>



-- 
Roy Harrington
roy@...
www.harrington.com