Digital BW, The Print

Tyler wrote:
"I think you are much better off spending the $50 on QTR and using 
your color inks to fine tune your hue. You can still use the MIS K 
ink if you like."

I just now got around to downloading and playing around with 
Quadtone RIP on my 2200.  How things have changed since I last 
RIPped...  This baby is not just a RIP, it is a work of art.  Or if 
not that then at least a labor of love.  Nice smooth dither pattern 
(pretty much perfect at the 2880 setting) and more curve/separation 
options than anyone could possibly ask for.  But still quite useable 
by novices with the provided curves, even on paper they weren't 
exactly designed for.  That is probably no news to most of you here -
 but I haven't been ripping since around the time Adobe Pressready 
died so I'm impressed. My compliments to the chef!  Just for fun I 
made a quick curve in QTR using only the magenta and cyan inks (no 
black) since I wanted to see what an all blue print would look 
like.  Pretty straightforward, got me a blue print curve set (hmm 
one wonders what an all blue print would look like on that 1800 with 
that nice true blue ink!).  Guess I've got to get back into this 
printing stuff!

Only issue I see with QTR is that you can only icc profile/softproof 
in Photoshop for the exact paper settings *and* tint curve settings 
you use in QTR (which is where all the chanel separations occur). If 
you tweak the tint in Photoshop you get no interactive color changes 
in the print (density changes only since QTR converts any RGB file 
to greyscale before applying the separations).  That is pretty much 
standard for this sort of B&W RIP so no problem there, just a 
comparative issue.  For comparison, the other (non-QTR) choice is to 
create the channel separations in Photoshop and print from 
multichannel mode using a RIP that prints each channel as it is 
defined in Photoshop.  That gives you the interactive ability to see 
the effects of each curve tweak on the color/tone as you make them. 
But that is a more complicated and expensive way to go about it (it 
might still be my favorite way - I need to try one of those new RIPs 
that do that well for the 6/7/ or 8 color inksets). Although with 
the more recent 3 black/gray printers the only curves you'd use 
would be for tinting/toning not the more severe gray-value quadtone 
partitioning so that should not be the rocket science it once was on 
the 3000.

Or, in other words comparing the two types of RIPs, you can make 
lots of softproof icc profiles for using with a grayscale RIP like 
QTR, one for each paper-type/tint setup, and then you can see in 
Photoshop (but not change) what each set of selections gives you in 
the print. Or you can use a non-grayscale multi-channel RIP with one 
profile for each paper type and then get any number of interactive 
tint variations with that one profile by tweaking in Photoshop. 
Guess it depends on how much time you want to spend tweaking curves 
and seeing what happens to the image vs printing a nice gray image 
though an established tint curve...   :-)

And back to the topic of mixing inks -- like Tyler, I tried that a 
lot back in my old 3000 days. You can get some nice effects but I 
think the current set of Epson printers and all the inks and RIPs 
now available sort of make that all moot. Easier to mix color in the 
driver rather than the bottle.  Also, you may want to question if 
mixing inks could cause interactions between the colors of the inks 
(this used to be a problem even *after* printing with unmixed inks 
when the inks would blend on the paper then become less stable - not 
sure if that is still an issue with current inks).  

At any rate, if someone is going to blend up their own inks in the 
bottle, as a suggestion, I'll mention here an experiment that I did 
that had some very promising results: Mix equal parts of 
cyan/magenta, yellow/magenta, and cyan/yellow to get a red, blue, 
green inkset (that inkset is for a four-ink printer one would have 
to adapt it for a six ink printer).  Since red blue and green inks 
made this way can't combine to give anything other than *less* 
saturated blends on paper you get an inkset that lends itself to 
grayscale (or, at most, redscale, greenscale, or bluescale). In 
other words, when you print with, say, blue and red with this inkset 
you move as much toward neutral gray as toward purple.  The inkset 
can be icc profiled with some profiling software and your 
RGB "grayscale" images in Photoshop will be softproofable so you can 
see what changing the relative amounts of each RGB channel will do 
to the outcome.  Of course you would need a CMYK profile and RIP to 
see exactly what the K channel does but for most uses the RGB driver 
with an RGB profile works quite well with RGB inks.  Also, on the 
older 4 color printers, it does *not* give you those nice smooth dot-
less highlights you get with real quadtone inks and quadtone rip 
systems.  But on the more recent small-dot light-gray ink printers 
RGB might be an nice inkset that reduces color crossovers in the 
neutral grays.  Might work quite well in Quadtone RIP also..

Dan