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What I would add to Roy's useful summary is that (i) approaches 3 & 4 require a measurement device, which you have, whereas 1 & 2 don't; and (ii) the difference between approach 3 on the one hand and 2 & 4 on the other hand seems to reflect a difference of view about what sort of print you want - 2 & 4 tend to deliver more 'pop' and contrast, whereas 3 tends to deliver more open shadows and shadow detail, particularly on matte papers. I've written a partly tongue-in-cheek commentary on this difference of view here: http://www.cyberhalides.com/piezography-printing/the-piezography-heretic-to-convert-or-not-to-convert/ . This is written from the perspective of a Piezography user, but it applies to QTR with any inkset.

This article on using the Munki with QTR may be helpful, but note that it is a bit dated now:
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/better-black-and-white-profiling-with-the-colormunki/

---In QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com, <roy@...> wrote :

?? Targets for QTR linearization or for ICC profile creation are ALWAYS printed without

Color Management. "No Color Management" specifically ignores the embedded profile

even if one exists. So tagging targets has no effect if printed with NoCM.

QTR linearization creates a straight-line graph of K-values vs L--values, where K is the whole

range from K=0 (white) to K=100 (black) and L ranges from dMin to dMax. This is quite

different from Gamma 2.2 which is not a straight-line.

There are numerous ways to deal with this difference and you'll see that everyone's got

a favorite that they "swear by". The basic ones are:

1) get used to it, edit your files till they produce the print you like.

(might be surprising but I bet this is the most used -- after all that's what we did in darkroom)

2) add correction curve in Photoshop. It's a very convenient idea for Windows.

See www.paulroark.com for info on this.

http://www.paulroark.com/BW-Info/Eboni-4-Plus.pdf page 16 has a very good description

of the issue and of the solution

3) make ICC profile for soft-proofing. basically what you do here is edit your image under

soft-proofing so that output print matches what you want. nice for Windows but your files

are now targeted for a specific printing output

4) finally there's the standard color management approach. Make an ICC profile and print

with it. On a Mac with Print-Tool this is by far the easiest and in a sense the "standard" way.

With nice linearized QTR profiles the generic "QTR driver Gray Matte (or Photo) Paper"

ICC profiles do quite well but a customized one with all the QTR driver blending selections

etc is the best. Personally I like this the best but it's less convenient for PCs. Also if you are

used to #1 above you'll find it disconcerting at first because you have to re-get-used-to-it.

Roy

QTR-Quadtone RIP

Re: Color Management Confusion

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