It’s this insight that led me to trying the approach I described here (i.e., getting the image “right” on my calibrated monitor in Lightroom, then exporting with a linear ICC – Roy’s RGB_Matte_Paper.ICC, and then printing in QTR with attention to Ink Limit values). Note I also tried it with the ICC I made for that paper and ink, reading the L values from a print of a 21 step chart with a known even distribution of gray values; there was no difference to my eye in shadow detail compared to the export with RGB_Matte_Paper.ICC. Exporting with either seems to have lined things up properly in the shadows.
My guess would be that this is the most straightforward approach.
Just set up a Preset for this Export:
-- TIFF, convert to RGB_Matte_Paper on output, some reasonable PPI like 360.
You should be able to use this on any matte paper for decent screen/print match.
Set up a second one if you do Photo paper too.
Roy
BTW, several posts talk about a "linear" ICC/color space. The QTR driver curves are linear in L - Lab space,
but end points are dMin and dMax which makes them a little different than editing spaces -- such as
QTR_RGB_Lab, or gamma spaces. The linear with dMin and dMax are what the RGB_Matte_Paper
ICCs match. Since all the curves are linearized we get to have these "generic ICCs" that work
with many papers.
Roy