QTR-Quadtone RIP

I've been trying to build good profiles for Harman By Hahnemuhle Gloss Baryta (formerly Harman Gloss FB AL) on my 3880 with the UltraChrome K3 inks but I keep running into issues.

My initial scans of the calibration targets had the 95% and 100% too close together resulting in non-monotonic curve errors.  My initial thought was I needed to adjust the max ink, but I haven't been able to successfully print the ink separation target.  It only fills in two rows of swatches instead of 8, and those two are so full of ink it smears across the page.

This made me realize that despite my best efforts, I am not printing the sheet without color management  I discovered with CS5 you need to print using Adobe's Color Printer Utility.

Well, perhaps my initial curves were bad because I was incorrectly enabling color management, so I figured I'd try printing the grey linearization target using Adobe's Color Printer Utility.  That was a bust, it only prints RGB images!  On my 3880 it prints grey images as a blank page (although the print head seems to think its printing something).

So I'd like to convert the grey linearization target into RGB, but that requires, you guessed it, applying some sort of color management to map the K values 0-255 into RGB values.  I don't know the correct way to do this transformation!

Can anybody tell me how to correctly convert the grey linearization target to an RGB image so I can print it through Adobe's Color Printer Utility without color management?

Or is there a sane way to print the linearization target in CS5 without color management?

Sorry, been staring at this for hours and slowly losing my mind.  Wanted to get this printed before bed so it could dry overnight.  I guess I failed :-(

Thank you for your time, Ryan

Hmm, spending some more time poking around the board it looks like CS5 is generally bad news and the Adobe Color Printer Utility prints blank pages for everyone else.  What a sorry state of affairs.

If CS5 is incorrectly treating all grey images as "generic gray gamma 2.2", would converting to that profile before printing result in a sane linearization target?  If yes, then would that get me reasonably close to an accurate print with just the linearization and not an ICC profile?  I imagine there's some sequence of painful profile conversions/assignments that would allow me to further refine the print using an ICC profile, but I'm too tired to figure out what that sequence would be right now.

Or is this all for naught and I should just try to scrounge up a CS3 install CD?

Thanks again, Ryan

--- In QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com, "mackmantcp" <mackmantcp@...> wrote:
> If CS5 is incorrectly treating all grey images as "generic gray gamma 2.2", would converting to that profile before printing result in a sane linearization target?

I tried this and the linearization target matched the one I got from the Apple Preview App (I guess it's actually unmanaged). I made a print using the resulting profile and it's much, much better than what I was getting with my broken profile.  I think with this linearization and an ICC profile for soft-proofing (but not for printing) I should be good to go.