QTR-Quadtone RIP

Brian is very much into numbers and linearisation, for some very good reasons. Because of this I've learned a lot in a short period of time, and that's without much of the colour management hardware.  For me, not having the colour management tools forces me to be more of a final print matters guy.  

I compared Epson's ABW and QTR prints, it struck me that the ABW looked sharper than it was supposed to.  Brian had produced an ABW curve showing that dark tones were getting crunched together.  As deep shadows went to grey, the ABW print went almost from black to white.  The sharpening effect was not necessarily offensive, but I wasn't in control of it.  That I don't like.

Brian also did a curve for Roy's RGBicc profile, and it showed some crunching of deep shadows also.  That left me wondering if Roy's profiles were really meant for soft proofing only, and not for embedding into the TIFF for printing.  (This would be a similar workflow as in piezography, I believe.)  

I seem to be getting a nice final print by soft proofing with the RGBicc, but not embedding it into the file before printing.  I haven't tried embedding the icc and printing myself.  Maybe I'll try it and see if it has any significant effect on the final print.  Unfortunately, the only matte paper I have is Red River Aurora Art Natural which doesn't have a large dmax for deep shadows.  

Brian, if I've got some of this wrong, feel free to rip it apart!

Larry





On Feb 14, 2016, 18:57, at 18:57, "rdeloe1@... [QuadtoneRIP]" <QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>Brian, I tried hard to make it clear that my comments relate only and
>entirely to Lightroom. I don't use Photoshop and have nothing to say
>one way or the other about soft proofing from PS. I'm very happy to
>hear that it works well for you and other people who use Photoshop. 
>
>Logically a custom ICC should be more accurate than a generic one like
>RGB_Matte_Paper. I totally agree. However, when I compared soft
>proofing with RGB_Matte_Paper and custom profiles, I saw the histogram
>changing ever so slightly, but the image itself did not change in a way
>that was apparent to my eye. Similarly, when I exported from Lightroom
>with custom profile and with RGB_Matte_Paper and then printed, looking
>carefully for differences, I didn't see any. I'll be the first to admit
>that this isn't conclusive evidence of anything. What I did notice was
>that with the custom ICC for the optically brightened paper, Lightroom
>reported that the image was out of gamut for both screen and printer.
>Given that the generic one seemed to be handling my shadows properly, I
>simply chose to not bother finding out what the issue was. So for me,
>"better" simply means "it seems to work and produces results I like
>with no issues". It's a personal call. 
>
>You're correct that I'm definitely in the camp that says what matters
>is the final print. This clearly is a hangover from my darkroom days!
>Keith Cooper's claim that "the usefulness of soft proofing is
>frequently overplayed, and used as an excuse not to really get a feel
>for how printers perform with different papers" is pretty strong. He
>was writing about Photoshop. If soft proofing in Lightroom helped me
>make better prints, I'd be using it religiously. I would be happy to
>find out that I'm doing something wrong and not getting the full
>benefit of soft proofing in Lightroom. In the meantime, I can make
>prints that meet my expectations. 
>
>Happy printing.