QTR-Quadtone RIP

>I went ahead and purchased carts with the ut14 inks for my R1400. ...

> Anyway, I downloaded the ICC profiles & Curves from Paul's site. 
> I was wondering a few things.

> 1) I see curves for warm and neutral, but none for cool. 
> How would I change them for making cool tone prints?

The "neutral" curves have a straight line response between the paper white
and black.  See the graph at page 8 of
http://www.paulroark.com/BW-Info/UT14.pdf

I think you'll find that one a cool, brightened paper, that straight line
will look cool without being blue.  However, if you want cooler, you can
open one of the neutral curves and add more cyan (red curve) and take out an
equal amount of magenta (green curve).

I didn't make QTR curves, but using a simple cross-over (an LK-PK one might
work well) for LM-M and LC-C, then using the sliders to determine how much
or each you want for the various parts of the image should work well.

>2) The names are a little confusing to me. 
> Can you please explain to me what all the letters mean?

Maybe :)  W = warm.  N = neutral.  Sometimes a paper is referenced, but
often the same curves work well for whole groups of papers, particularly if
re-linearized.

>... IlfordGold-N-1-nca-rgb.icc,

The paper is Ilford Gold; the tone is Neutral (first one); "NCA" means to
set the driver to "No Color Adjustment;"  "rgb" is inserted by QTR where the
ICC includes a curve (the output to the printer is in rgb).

> IlfordGold-LW-Warm-rgb,

This somewhat replicates the Lens Work warm split tone. 


>IlfordGold-warm-1-nca-rgb.

This is the warm curve (the first one), and the driver should be on No Color
Adjustment.

>  ...  cc22

Set the driver to Color Controls, with gamma 2.2.

> 3) How do I print these in QTR without any quad files? 
> Can the curves or ICC's be converted to work in QTR

These are all for Epson driver printing.  While the people on this forum are
obviously proficient in and probably prefer the QTR rip, in general the
market for a color-managed, Epson driver workflow appears to be larger.
Roy's Create ICC (& -RGB) are great tools that can serve this market.  For
many users, how to get the monitor to match the print is a total mystery
that the ICC ("color managed" at least with respect to relative density)
really helps.  

If it looks like QTR profiles are needed, I can re-load UT14 and make a few
of the basic ones.  In general, I've assumed most on this forum make their
own, but let me know if I'm wrong here.  

Keep in mind that I'm not MIS and do this mostly to help ensure that we have
a nice competitive B&W market of suppliers.  I have not, however, made a
large number of profiles for this setup.  I encourage people who don't have
QTR to buy it and re-linearize curves for their favorite papers.  The same
curves generally work OK for many papers of the same type. (I might add here
that my interest in making sure MIS survives has been increased by their
manager of the last few years being let go.  Bob Zeiss is back in the
saddle, and the company is showing much more interest in being responsive to
the needs of their B&W customers.) 

>4) On glossy paper, I am guessing even it I set the paper 
>type to Matte, if I pick a glossy ICC profile it will direct 
> the printer to use the Yellow Ink channel which is Gloss...correct?


Be sure to read http://www.paulroark.com/BW-Info/UT14.pdf  Let me know if
there are sections of that paper that are unclear.  These ICCs are inserted
in the Photoshop Print Preview.  

The current, default setup of UT14 is to have glop in the yellow position.
The blue curve controls this.  For Photoshop curves (now supported by
Elements apparently) you have to think it complementary colors: red curve
controls cyan channel, blue-yellow, green-magenta.

>I much rather use QTR, ...

I'd guess many if not most on this forum feel that way.  On the other hand,
you might be surprised at how good the Epson driver can be.  Again, recall
that the average MIS customer will probably buy the inkset, plug it in, and
print without even knowing what Epson driver settings to use.  So "plug and
play" and then small steps away from this are how most of MIS's new B&W
customers slowly learn how to do all this.  The C8X "EZ" inksets were a huge
product for them.  Hitting a newbie who doesn't even know what a RIP is with
QTR would take a lot more customer service than would be consistent with
MIS's low price business model.  

Back to QTR, there is a way to import Photoshop curves into QTR.  In the
Curve Creator, for each color you can use "Load curve" to pull in an *.acv
curve.  It's been awhile since I did this.  I assume you'd have to make
one-curve, grayscale versions of each color and load them separately.  It's
probably easier to just use an existing QTR curve set or the Gray curve
generator to make curve for the channel and mix them.  

You'll need to deal with glop independently.  That curve is easy to copy
from the blue curve in one of my *.acv curves for glossy papers. It's easy
to just eye-ball the results on a 21-step curve to see where more is needed
and what ink load works best.  I'd use the least glop needed for a good
image.  This avoids overloading the paper.  Super-light inks can easily lead
to this on glossy papers.  (That was a big reason for my dropping the
original UT1 approach -- blotchy glossy printing.)  Tiny dots and denser
inks help glossy printing.  Note the 1800 -- no light inks, dual Ks, plus
glop.  This is clearly a machine that was made for glossy printing.


Paul
www.PaulRoark.com