It's true that the orthodox theology of K7 printing is that you convert your image to GG2.2 and sent it to QTR in GG2.2 to print. The problem with this approach is that you may or may not get a good screen-to-print match. It's a better match for even or light-tone images than it is for dark images. The orthodox way of dealing with this is to create an ICC profile for your K7 curve / printer / paper / inkset combination and soft-proof the image on the screen with the preserve numbers option enabled in Photoshop softproofing. Not everyone finds this a convenient workflow, especially if the image needs re-editing
because the soft-proof is too light.
The alternative worklflow is to convert the image to the ICC profile for printing. Soft-proofing is then done the conventional way. This will give a better screen-to-print match, but at the cost of compressing the shadows. The argument for conversion is that it is "perceptually linear", but even Roy Harrington in a recent post in this forum conceded that it does risk losing shadow detail because of the way that it compresses the shadows. The K7 GG2.2 workflow on the other hand is intended to preserve shadow detail.
So there's a choice - work in GG2.2 and perhaps need to re-edit to put more weight back into the shadows, or convert to the ICC profile and instead re-edit to recover some of the lost shadow detail. I decide on an image-by-image basis.
It's been a while since I printed K3 using QTR, but my view is that the workflow options and the advantages and disadvantages are essentially the same, because what is driving them is QTR and its ICC creation tools, rather than the inksets per se.
B.
---In QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com, <ognita@...> wrote :
Hi,
I am using K3 ink with QTR on a 3880. Should I still convert my images into Gamma 2.2?
I have read for conversion is needed for K7 inks. Do I need to do the same for an optimal print?
Thanks!
ReD