I recently set up a restored 7890 with a new head that I will be converting to Piezography Neutral K7.
Before I did that I wanted to see how good I can make some neutral prints with the Epson color inks out of qtr for teaching purposes. I used to use QTR with older epson printers but it has been a LONG time.
I just set up an Epson P800 for one of my clients and right off the bat we made some lovely totally neutral prints on Platine with the existing generic Neutral curves. It was so good I was a little shocked at how clean and uniform the hue was in all areas of the ramp.
Anyway I was playing with the 7890 last night with Canson Rag Photographique and see that there are no neutral qtr curves with these previous printers ( I assume the same is the case with my 3880 ) and that you need to blend a warm with a cool. The "selenium" curve is so magenta it seems totally unworkable to me.
So what are people using for a clean neutral on Photorag or Rag Photographique and Platine. You have three curves to blend. I have used one warm and one cool together so far. Still seems a little cool to me on Rag Photo and Photorag but it might be good for Platine with PK which I haven't tried yet. Are there any other
formulas I should play with? And/Or does anyone have a custom curve that I could try out for either the 7890 for the 3880 in neutral hue? I don't see many curves for more recent printers in the Files section here.
John
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Re: [QuadtoneRIP] Neutral Prints With QTR and 7890
2018-05-16 by Paul Roark
FWIW (and hopefully not to OT), some of what I think I learned in experimenting with different inkset approaches is that most people cannot profile an inkset that uses the high gamut OEM colors. It's just too sensitive, and sometimes the color pigments seem to be absorbed differently with different papers/coatings. So, a premixed neutral that is profiled by the seller for the specific papers one wants makes a lot of sense for most. Very well made OEM profiles can be fine, but it takes a good profilier to do it for different papers. If good profiles exist, great, but what's good for one paper may need more than just a relinearization to look neutral on a different paper.
I now use Canon pigs for my toner mix. I think Canon does a better job of matching the pigment absorptions on different papers, perhaps due to more uniform sizes of the color pigments, but I don't know. I always suspected that the magenta, historically much weaker than the cyan pigs, was ground to a slightly larger size in the early inksets we had in an effort to better match the longevity of the colors. However, I speculated that also caused the magenta to end up being held more on the surface of some papers than the cyan, with the result that at least on some papers, a "neutral" on one paper became too "selenium" (magenta) on a different paper.
It also appears that usually lighter tones need more color than the darker ones to be neutral. So, a neutral inkset
(depending of one's definition of such)
cannot just be different dilutions of a basic carbon to color ratio. On the other hand, such a constant ratio inkset, which will typically give slightly warmer highlights, appeals to some as something of a "split tone."
I always use QTR these days (although some of the inkset designs on my main inkset webpage remain Epson driver compatible).
With the single pre-mixed color (bluish) toner I use in all my B&W printers now (the other positions are all 100% carbon), I find that, while I start with a pre-made QTR toner curve, I always end up translating that into discreet points so that I can fine tune it. One needs a spectro to do this well, in my view. This as well as the difficulty of making good profiles knocks out most B&W printers.
In my view, the post 1280 days and the "ABW" OEM inksets made the dedicated B&W approach obsolete for the average B&W photographer. If I were in the business of doing pro-level color as well as B&W, I might well just stay with the OEM solutions and profiles. (But what fun is that? Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!)
I think for the small minority of us who still use the dedicated B&W approaches, the rewards are probably, in part, in our knowing that it is superior, even if the buyers are clueless. It also can save us lots of money in ink costs. I know that some of the large users of my approaches are schools or other such institutions where holding down costs are probably the main reason for using a dedicated B&W approach.
Regards,
Paul
On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 11:32 AM, deanwork2003@yahoo.com [QuadtoneRIP] <QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com> wrote: