QTR-Quadtone RIP

--- In QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com, "Tom Moore" <r.t.moore@...> wrote:
>
> Ben
> 
> Thanks for the info. I've never tried to produce a digital negative. If I
> understand you then, simply inverting the image and printing it using QTR
> would devote too much of the tonal range to the highlights and not enough
> for the shadows in the eventual image. 

Exactly. If you make, say, a Ziatype (palladium, etc.) print of a Stouffer wedge, the dark 
steps on the print will be too close together. So the light tones of the neg. need bigger 
steps. Dot gain does this naturally, and QTR profiles are designed to reverse that effect for 
a digital inkjet print, so it's doing stuff I'd need to undo again, at least to get a clean step 
wedge. I may decide to vary the plan later for expressive purposes or to allow for the 
characteristics of the original negative, but if I figure out a good system, that should be 
possible. Most current digital-negative schemes take the print engine as is and tweak the 
Photoshop file. I like to subject my files to the least possible abuse in Photoshop so the 
right ink profiles would help in that.


>Have you considered creating (or
> using an existing) regular curve using QTR and then adjusting the gamma
> and/or shadow setting in QTR before printing? You may have to calibrate your
> adjustments by printing out a few step wedges.

That would be much too easy! I may end up doing just that, but I thought I'd try for total 
control first, which may allow me to get more nozzles firing than the standard QTR 
routine. 

Is there a way to see what's in that Drop-Quad-Profile black-box, ie. how it decides what 
overlaps it uses between inks, and balances the densities and volume, etc? - although I'm 
happier figuring things out for myself than reverse-engineering other folks hard work.

It's good to have something to mess with when it's snowing this hard, and it might even 
work...



> 
> Tom Moore
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com [mailto:QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com] On
> > Behalf Of stolptse
> > Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2007 10:05 PM
> > To: QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com
> > Subject: [QuadtoneRIP] Re: How do I import Excel files into QTR?
> > 
> > Hi Tom,
> > 
> > It's not clear to me either...
> > 
> > I'm figuring out a workflow to make digital negs. As these have inverted
> > characteristics
> >
>