To answer your questions above:
The problem happened rather suddenly, within one evening of printing (in late July), showed up in extremely mild ways in a few prints (<5) and then got bad enough to notice, at which time, going backwards, I realized that it hadn't started all at once. The inks I am using now are all from the same bottles that produced some extremely nice prints before hand, were all purchased at the same time, around one year ago. It is part of my procedure to shake the bottles before filling the syringes, and extra care was taken to do that when I went through and purged and refilled all of the cartridges, after the problem happened.
Paul, speaking to your question, the print you're seeing was printed on Moab Entrada Natural paper, using the following settings:
Color Handing: Photoshop manages color
Printer Profile: QTR_RGB_Matte_Paper
Rendering Intent: Perceptual
with black point compensation checked.
Under the Quadtone Rip Preferences, I have chosen Eb6-Moab-Entrada-Natural-12-2011 under Curve 1, with all settings at 100% and no other curves chosen.
(( Interestingly Richard, when I go into the QTR applications folder, and look in the 1400-1430-MIS folder, the eb6 profiles aren't there... just MK and PK profiles. I vaguely recollect having to install profiles in a different way last year, when I set things up initially. Looking in the Library didn't lead me to them... I'll have to look further. ))
Resolution is set at 2880dpi unidirectional, and all other selections at 0 or default.
The effect happens at both 8-bit and 16-bit settings.
I want to specify again, I was getting really gorgeous prints with the entire setup until I wasn't. I'm uploading a couple examples of the stuff I printed before the problem, including another portrait from before, and printed now, with the same settings as before exhibiting the issue. Here's the link again:
Eboni Carbon Printing Diagnosis
Also, Paul, I have tried looking for a way to print straight from the Epson driver, as per the basic overview that comes with QTR, but I can't seem to find a way to do that on the Mac. I have tried printing straight from Preview, and while it was a crappy print, it did not exhibit the behavior, which makes me think it is a QTR issue.
I deeply appreciate the help trying to sort this problem out. As I said, I was quite happy with the prints I was getting before, which makes the bad ones all the more frustrating.
Stephen