http://www.bwmastery.com/quadtoneprofiler/
I've done a lot of work automating some of the more repetitive tasks and came up with ways of using custom ink calibration images along with ColorPort or i1 Profiler for speeding up the whole process. I've automated everything from finding the ink limits for each shade, getting the exact cross over points, and generating the qidf profile. You basically just need to define the printer and the inks and then generate, print, and measure the targets. A lot of these things are similar to the standard QTR profiling approach but incorporate my methods of evenly dividing the tonal scale with the number of inks you want to use to get the best overlap for the smoothest profile. It takes something that would have taken more than two hours to now being about 15-30 minutes and using a single sheet of paper.
One thing I am most excited about is finally solving the problem of the sharp edges in the QTR-generated curves where one ink begins and the next falls off. The Quad Curve Smoothing tool i made allows you to change the start and end points of each ink as well as change the shape each the curve while maintaining the same general ink density as the original curves. These things still need final linearization so I spruced up my QuadLin curve linearization tools. It now has an even more advanced curve linearization to change the shape of the final density curve that doesn't rely on the QTR Linearize-quad app. The new version also uses measurements of 51-step targets that are interpolated to 128 control points for the correction curve, lookup, and new quad value calculations. (I even put in an option for my own data smoothing function for really noisy data that you might get from a SpyderPrint device). The instructions have methods for easily getting multiple samples from the spyder print and a 51x4 averaging and graphing tool for checking for linearity and using the QuadLin tools.
These things were all supposed to be part of the larger QTR book, but they kind of took on a life of their own over the past few months and I wanted to get them out there while I finish up editing, making screen shots and designing my QTR book. I am charging a little for the tools, but honestly that is the only way I could justify all the time I put into it, and to offset any support time for it in the future.
If you use the code QuadTonePro at checkout you'll get $15 off through the end of November.
Anyway, I hope this is useful and that no one get's too offended by the sales pitch...
All the best,
Richard Boutwell