QTR-Quadtone RIP

I am still rather new to all of this.  My goal is to be able to print 
black and white using the stock OEM cartridges from Epson on my r1800. 

I have been using Matt Chapin's curves with Ilford Pearl and Kirkland 
Glossy papers with very satisfactory (to my eyes) results. 

My problem lies with the Matte papers and the default curves. Although 
this may be semantics, "Black" is warm to my eye and "Cool" is neutral 
to my eye and there is really no "Cool" setting that I find 
satisfactory. 

As I do not have the money to invest in an Eye One spectrometer, are 
there any other useres who have been able to get really cool grey 
results with the stock inks that would be willing to share there curves?

My biggest complaint is that I can not obtain truly good blacks for my 
shadow areas.  

For now the best that I have been able to obtain is the following:

45% EEH cool (came with QTR)
45% Ilford cool no glop (from Matt Chapin) 
10% Black (came with QTR) for better shadow detail

1440 x 1440 super (2880 only wasted ink in my opinion)
Adaptive Hybloyd dither. 

no corrections to midtones or shadows.   When I was using the cool 
setting by itself, the shadow slider did not seem to have any effect.

All my images are 8-bit tiffs with the QTR matt icc embeded 

Any thoughts (or curves) would be greatly appreciated. 


Sincerely


Alan Tochterman

--- In QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com, "Alan Tochterman"
<alantochterman@...> wrote:
>
> I am still rather new to all of this.  My goal is to be able to print 
> black and white using the stock OEM cartridges from Epson on my r1800. 

I'm rather new at this too, but it's my understanding that the OEM
Epson carts in the 1800 don't give good b/w results. I'm using the 3MK
approach in my 1800, developed by Paul Roark. Are you familiar with
that? I have 100% carbon Eboni ink in the two black positions and the
GLOP position. Do you frequent the DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint Yahoo
Group? You can learn more about this and other b/w processes there.

I've been pretty happy with my results, although soon after I got the
1800 the 1400 came out and Paul prefers it over the 1800. He's getting
very good results using only one Eboni black cartridge in that printer.

Hope this helps,

Paul