QTR-Quadtone RIP

Thank you for that ringing endorsement, Mick, especially given your teaching role.

I'm not going to give Les Walkling an unqualified endorsement, for reasons that will become apparent, but his material listed in that first link I gave earlier is worth exploring. There are a number of informative videos and documents. The video I linked to is more advanced, and assumes a basic monitor calibration for print as a starting point.

Let me digress and tell you a tale, which will have some relevance for Per. Some time last year the National Portrait Gallery here advertised a free seminar on getting a good screen to print match, or some title like that, featuring Les. Normally his workshops are expensive, and so I jumped at my first opportunity to hear him (and for free), given that he is something of a controversial figure here that divides opinion. Well, the seminar was just a 1½ presentation of that 5:41 video in my second link. Why did it take so long? Because in reality the seminar was primarily a hard sell for Eizo monitors, as Les is an ambassador for them. I'm fairly certain that the seminar was underwritten by Eizo. Les is also a consultant to Canson in AU and sells training and profile creation services.

As luck would have it, I was giving a presentation to and judging at the local U3A photo group a few days later, and asked if anyone had been at that seminar? A number of hands went up accompanied by groans. People had gone along to a seminar at a reputable national institution to learn about something of interest, only to be told that they had to spend thousands on a professional grade monitor. I was able to reassure them that for non-critical work it is possible to get perfectly acceptable results with a lot less.

Now I (and others) are probably a bit guilty of doing a "Les" here, in suggesting to Per that he needs an Eizo. If you understand the principles, have decent gear and learn how to calibrate and use it and learn through experience how to interpret your soft proofs, you can go a long way. The further you go and the more critical you become, an Eizo will help. IMHO where it particularly helps is printing B&W on matte papers. My sense is that Per can make progress in leaps and bounds with what he has now.

For that reason, I think that he should master the P800 and Epson inks first. As a Piezography user it would be hypocritical of me to counsel against using it. But he is going to have the exact same issues with it as he is having now with an OEM setup. I suggest that he needs to master that first. Piezo is not a magic bullet to solve your monochrome printing problems, it's an option to further refine the craft.

Harvey asked "Question: what would be the difference between adjusting the monitor and adjusting a LUT in the driver? Isn't that really what adjusting the monitor is doing?" There are others much better qualified to answer this than I, but my understanding is that It's doing it with much greater precision, i.e dialing in a precise luminosity, contrast, white point, which is what you want to simulate a given paper exactly. Adjusting the LUT reduces the effective levels of grey down from 256, adjusting the monitor does not. A hardware calibrate-able monitor allows you to quickly switch from one configuration to another as you switch from editing for online to editing for print, and as you switch papers, etc etc. Perhaps others can add to or subtract from this list.