QTR-Quadtone RIP

In my opinion, Richard’s tool is underpriced for how many support emails he’ll be getting asking questions about how to use it . . (or how to make curves or DNs!) . unless he assumes we’ll all support it on this forum for free?  Or on IJM’s forum? Or DigBlackAndWhite? This seems like a cost-neutral thing or possibly a money-loser at $40.00. 


Piezography Professional Edition is a continually upgraded and modified toolset and support license (gives access to a private support forum for users who need direct a timely service as we are an internationally distributed company with many Piezo labs and artists doing printing every day needing custom support) and also it pays for continual Piezo master curve and tool development and documentation. It’s also cost-neutral (we calculated this) at $150.00 so I have no idea how Richard came up with $40.00 . . . there are a lot of factors to think about when releasing software or service or support beyond just the initial labor. Releasing something into the world costs money after someone has bought it. They expect documentation and support and compatibility with their version of Excel, etc etc etc. Some of this is directly reflected in this thread, and should be actually posted on a support forum that is no the QTR support forum but that does not exist (and that would cost time and labor and money to set up). You see what I mean?

best,
-Walker


> On Nov 2, 2016, at 3:18 AM, richard@richardboutwell.com [QuadtoneRIP] <QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Thank you everyone for the comments. Brian, I put your questions in bold and responded below. It got long, even after some cutting...
> 
> ''Richard and I had an off-forum conversation about when you charge for something and when you don't.  It's possible that his hesitancy in posting his new for-sale tool-set reflects that conversation, but if so then it shouldn't.  My view, FWIW, is that anyone can charge for anything, they just have to be able to demonstrate the value.  
> 
> I didn’t hold off selling these earlier because of those conversations. But, as I said then, I wanted to make sure whatever I put out was in a state that I was happy with and proud of. I am proud of these, but of course there is more I wish I could have done before releasing them. I really thought they would have been done a month earlier, and  I was dead set on getting them out before the end of Oct. I am happy with the functionality for its intended use as it is. From here I will spend some time working on the rest of the QTR book and will introduce updates as I get feedback from people who have already bought it. Then I will start to introduce some of the additional features I've been dreaming up. Basically, if I didn't get it out as it is now, I might never have, and that wouldn't be fair to people this could end up helping. 
> 
> I did consider releasing some of the previous versions of some of these tools for free but was advised against it, and the time answering questions and fixing problems would not have been worth it. That is one reason I made the QuadLin stuff a service when I introduced it a few years ago. There was some hand tweaking and even more manual copying and pasting that would have just been too complicated and annoying for people—free or paid. I was able to make the correction curve tools available for free because they were relatively easy to make and there was very little that could go wrong with the formulas or the copying and pasting.
> 
> ''I haven't read all of the information about Richard's new tool-set yet, but my initial impression is that the value appears to be there.   There certainly appears to be a lot of effort and ingenuity there, and he understands the curve creation process as well as anyone and better than most.   Since this is a stand-alone product, I assume that there is a perpetual license (and a year of updates), unlike the forthcoming IJM tool-set which has a fairly hefty annual license fee (although all references to that seem to have vanished, so I can't be sure that that's still the case).
> 
> Thank you, I spent a long time working this stuff out for myself and tested lots of different methods and learned a lot about stuff I never intended to along the way.
> 
> Format and pricing:  I struggled a long time with how to price these tools and what format they should be in—including how much trouble I should go through trying to generate user licenses, serial numbers, and unlock codes, or or if I should just make it a software-as-a-service web app hidden behind a paywall. I decided that was all too much work for as small of a niche this QTR stuff is, and it would end up just being a little too user hostile…
> 
> So yes, once you have the download you can use it for as long as you want without too much restriction (basically you can’t start a profiling service using these tools or make copies to sell or hand out to other people). Basically, I ask that people pay the license so I can justify the time I’ve already spent on it and any time I spend making it better (and the time it takes for email support and spending a few hours responding to questions on forums. Maybe I’m asking too little after all….) jk, I do realize how I would react if this these tools three or four times the price. I would just build my own… 
> 
> ''In another recent thread I asked about split-tone K3 recipes.  As I have a current interest in K3 curves, I could well be interested in the new toolset.  I noted a current thread on Lula in which you (Richard) said that the initial release is only for monochrome inksets.  I'm a bit puzzled by that.  You mean that you can 't use the current release at all for K3, or is it just that the toning components are missing, so that any curves you built would be warm curves without toners?  I suspect the latter.  Will K3 be a separate release, or an extension of the current release?
> 
> The current release is for 1-6 partitioned gray inks only, and it does not have options for the toner partitions yet. There are several reasons for this, but mostly I needed to consider how different people will use the toner partitions with some of the automated features in the current tools. For instance, I’ve made profiles that have 4 carbon gray inks and two selenium (like shade 5 and 2) as toner inks that run under the whole scale, and I have plans on testing a K6+CMY ink set in the coming months. Something like would be cool to be able to do with the automated tools, but isn’t really applicable to people working with the OEM inks. basically, i don’t have a good solution yet, but it wasn’t a big enough reason to hold back releasing it—especially considering that so many people are only using single tinted systems like the Eboni or Piezography K6 or P2 ones and I spent a lot of time privately and publicly trying to fix problems that arise from the some of the QTR methods. This was just a way to solve some problems before people threw their printers off the roof. 
> 
> I mentioned elsewhere that I am considering making these two completely different profiling systems—One for OEM Epson K3+C,M,Y,lc,lm,(o,g) and premade toner curve options, and one for dedicated black and white ink sets with custom toner partition options. They are really different products for different kinds of users. K3+color profiles are less demanding and are easier to make than profiles with more than 4 gray inks, and one the goals of these profiling tools was make creating K4-K6 profiles easier and to solve some of the problems with the nature of QTR-generated curves (sharp corners of the curves, and banding in the gradients). 
> 
> 
> As for software, will these tools work in LibreOffice Calc?  I gather there is some compatibility.  Did you consider building this in Calc, given that it's free and cross-platform?
> 
> I downloaded LibreOffice and tried opening a few of the files with Calc. It crashed repeatedly. Honestly, I didn’t try to build these with an open source spreadsheet app because these tools started out in Excel as personal profiling tools going back to 2010-2011. I kept extending and modifying them until it got to this point. I am not opposed to recreating them with Libre Calc, and i’ll look into it, but I have to consider how long it would take basically rebuilding everything from scratch. At that point it might be better to just make a stand alone profiling app… 
> 
> ''As an old die-hard Measure Tool hold-out, I understand I'd have to create my own MT-compatible charts manually.  Such is the lot of an old die-hard.
> I was an old MeasureTool holdout too, but I don’t think you can make custom targets from CGATS reference files with the free demo mode of ProfileMaker5. ColorPort works well, especially if you are using older measurement devices, but it still requires a reference file for the measurements. the reference files actually make working with i1 Profiler worse so I just manually define the chart structure and measure in strip mode. I started having a problem with i1 Profiler a few days ago when I went to make some screen recording videos and am still trying to sort that out. Honestly though, the more I work with ColorPort, the better I feel about it. The only problem I see with it is that it just doesn’t work with the newest measurement devices. 
> 
> Anyway, this is long enough an it is way past my bedtime. 
> 
> Cheers, 
> Richard Boutwell
> 
> http://www.richardboutwell.com/ <http://www.richardboutwell.com/>
> http://www.bwmastery.com/ <http://www.bwmastery.com/>
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