It's been a long thread and I haven't had time to get into it.
GRAY LAB_L
0.00 96.00
100.00 16.00
Just change the 16 to 12 and you'll get less shadow compression. Just run the
--
I think it was Brian who kept a link to an old post of mine - thanks.
Here it is:
There's a lot of pretty loose talk about linearity. To me linear just means you've
got a graph with x and y axes and the line is a straight-line. You HAVE to define
what the 2 axes are. So "linear print" just doesn't mean much. I guess the
only possible meaning is "matches the screen" -- which in itself is up to interpretation.
In QTR tools linear always means straight-line graph of K input data and L on the print.
The trick is going from a idealized editing profile to this linear L graph -- dMin to dMax.
You can always edit the file to get the print that you want -- there's nothing magic
about a particular workflow. But the convenient thing is to be able to look at the screen
and be pretty confident what the print will look like (or at least close).
The whole ICC Color Management technology is a way to do this match more automatically.
It works quite well in general but with B&W the deep shadows are more important
and more affected by lighting -- both during editing and during display of print.
So I think there's a bit more room here for personal taste and tweaking.
Because QTR driver profiles are linearized and thus standardized it's pretty good
to just use generic ICC profiles -- thus Matte-Paper and Photo-Paper ICC's.
They are trivially simple -- straight-lines from L=96 to L=16 and from L=96 to L=8
respectively. I made these a long time ago so maybe with darker dMax these
days they could be changed.
If you've got particular desires for your personal setup -- maybe this can help:
You can easily make your own generic ICCs if you'd like to vary the shadow
compression vs overall print density. Edit your own text file.
This is the current Matte-Paper ICC:GRAY LAB_L
0.00 96.00
100.00 16.00
Just change the 16 to 12 and you'll get less shadow compression. Just run the
text file through Create-ICC (gray or RGB).
Try different values to see what makes your workflow easiest.
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Specifically for Piezography inks and curves:
I'm not sure what the linearization for the custom curves is. Seems like some info
shows graphs of straight-lines but some info says tailored to GG2.2.
Walker, can you confirm how the piezo curves are linearized? or more precisely
show a graph of K vs L for both matte and photo paper curves.
Note that if you use the QTR-Linearize-Quad script you will get linearization
in straight-line K vs L like the rest of QTR driver curves.
>> That said, OS X is free now, and it can be installed in VMware. It’s basically
>> 70 bucks to get OS X running virtually inside of a Windows machine if one
>> wants to run Print-Tool but they only have a PC.
BTW, have you actually run OSX & Print-Tool under Windows? Which versions?
Regards,
Roy