Thank you, everyone for your comments and for all the support for the new system.
I would never expect anyone to answer questions about my products here, lulu, bwdigitalprint, or on the IJM sites. I can understand Walker’s concern about having to answer questions about my workflow on the Piezography forums and I discourage anyone posting questions there about my stuff there. One of the reasons I made this set of tools was because I found I was answering too many questions for other people's systems and set out to make a tool that would hopefully cut down on some of that.
About there not being a support forum for this: It is being built. I was a little hesitant at making yet another internet photography forum, but I decided that a private forum for customers only would be in everyones’ best interest. I think general/presale questions like the ones here are relevant, but I don't expect other people to answer those for me, and I hope they don’t become excessive or annoying to general readers. I have enough questions from people already to create a real FAQ and will put that up shortly.
More about support: I had already planned on a second membership site for all the support materials and video tutorials. I am working on that now, but in the mean time, I am answering questions by email through the form on the bwmastery/quadtoneprofiler page or directly at support@quadtoneprofiler.com
As for the price: I am happy to hear people think it is worth more than I am selling it for, but I thought long and hard about the price and what I would consider fair given that the range of people using go from hobbyists to professional print labs. I think I have struck a good balance based on it being dependent on Excel, the cost of QTR (as Brian pointed out), and the fact that people still need to either invest in (or already have) a measurement device.
Digital negatives: The current tools will NOT work for digital negatives, because the math behind some of the stuff needs to be inverted for it to work properly. I do have a non-automated digital negative version, but there is a lot of manual data entry and copying and pasting that I would not consider user friendly. I will be incorporating all the automation stuff in the current tool and will be releasing it as a second product in about three weeks. The DN version will be based around the same workflow of measuring custom ink calibration images that generate all the ink descriptor file settings. There will also be a deluxe edition will have DN curve smoothing and linearization tools. There are some cool things I have in mind that will make it easy to create a negative for traditional darkroom work or positive film for gravure. I have spoken to a few gravure people that I will work with to test it so those features might be further off.
Cheers,
Richard Boutwell
http://www.richardboutwell.com/