QTR-Quadtone RIP

Sorry for being a tease, but I didn't want to clog the thread with unnecessary detail if there was no interest.

As Roy has described, Adobe don't make it easy to use ABW with ICC profiles. Party because they have a nasty habit of doing silent ICC conversions as part of the printing process.

I will concede that this is one of those instances where OS X is easier. The short Mac answer is to use Print Tool, which solves all those problems. On Windows you have to solve these Adobe-created problems yourself.

On Windows, to print with an ICC, you must:

1. Convert the image to the ICC in Photoshop.

2. Assign, NOT convert, the image to sRGB.

3. Print using Printer Manages Colours in the Photoshop print dialog.

You need step 3 in order to be able to access ABW in the printer driver settings. You need step 2, because Windows Photoshop (recent versions) will do a silent conversion to sRGB if you select Printer Manages Colours under Colour Handling, and so you need to fool Photoshop into thinking that it's already in sRGB. I have tested and measured this workflow and it works. I also tested leaving out step 2 and you get something odd.

So how do create the ICC in the first place? By taking the untagged 21x4 chart, or whatever chart you use to create a profile, and assigning it to Grey Gamma 2.2, converting it to AdobeRGB and then assigning (NOT converting) it to sRGB, printing it using ABW and the settings you'd normally use to print, and finally measuring and creating the ICC.

Is Mac easier? In this instance, yes. Is it worth changing to OS X just for this? Not for this little black duck.

The question I'd want to ask is, if you're going to all this trouble to measure and create ICCs for ABW, why not just use QTR(Gui)?

.................

If you want to read more about the silent sRGB conversion, here are two posts where I linked to a few threads on TOP. In the TOP comments section of those posts an Adobe software engineer, Dave Polaschek, discussed how Photoshop behaves on both Win and OS X under certain circumstances. Be warned, it's not easy reading.

My recollection was that you *could* print to ABW on OS X using by converting to an ICC and then selecting printer manages colours. The problem you may have is printing the untagged chart in order to create the ICC. My understanding is that on OS X, Photoshop does its silent ICC conversion on untagged images. But I haven't re-read those threads and I ain't a Mac guy.