QTR-Quadtone RIP

I may have a clue. Remember a few months back, I told you about an odd occurrence when making my brown tone prints with OEM Epson inks?

For everyone else\u2026

I work in B&W, making heavily chocolate toned prints with Epson OEM inks. (I also print with aftermarket MK inks in various dilutions, on a different printer.)

I do this by putting a fill layer at the top of my stack, set to \u201csolid color\u201d, mode set to \u201ccolor”, hue 43, saturation 100, brightness 13.

Recently I had a problem with one particular print that forced me to resort to QTR on that printer, using the three gray inks plus M and Y as toners. I was able to reproduce my brown tone exactly with just these five inks. Something I plan to do as a matter of course from now on, when I use this printer and ink set for brown tone prints. Here is the reason for not continuing with what I have used in the past, and the point of this post:

A few months ago I had the MK ink cartridge in my 3880 (the printer with OEM inks in it) fail. It just stopped providing ink right in the middle of making a print. (Maybe the software failed. Don\u2019t know, it never happened again.) The two gray inks may have failed also. This led to the startling and quite annoying discovery that when I make a chocolate brown print, Epson\u2019s driver decides to put down a HEAVY layer of Cyan underneath the color I want. Throwing ink on my print that I do not want there and is not needed because I have already proven I can get that brown with QTR, three blacks, magenta and yellow. No cyan required.

Though it is possible a software failure made the Epson driver think that MK was in the C slot, I doubt it. I think that heavy cyan deposit is routine. I presume Epson engineers think this makes a smoother/sharper/somehow better print. It is possible similar logic was applied to the ABW routines.

So, there is no way to know whether or not, when using the ABW driver, it too is not throwing in some colors you did not tell it too, unless you have a similar occurrence, where ABW stops using MK. If you are using all black inks with the ABW driver, the result might be a better, smoother print, because the Epson driver is using the black ink you have in the C and LC slots when you think it is not. Sort of like having an ink or two set to follow the curve of K in the QTR driver.

I need a drink now\u2026