QTR-Quadtone RIP

From: QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com [mailto:QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com] 
Sent: Monday, October 31, 2016 1:33 PM
To: QTR group group <QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: Re: [QuadtoneRIP] New Automated QTR Profiling Tools

 

  

I don’t mind Richard’s mild advertising in our QTR group - - - his posts have been informative, and the subject matter is directly QTR-relevant. 

 

I would be interesting in hearing back from members who try Richard’s profiling system/software.  From the description it sounds as though it depends on Microsoft Excel.  I don’t own Excel, and would have no other use for it.  Am I correct in assuming that other heavy-duty spreadsheets that claim to be Excel compatible would work just as well???

 

Myron Gochnauer 
BA, MA, PhD, LLB, LLM, dogman
goch@... <mailto:goch@...> 



 

On Oct 31, 2016, at 7:03 AM, richard@... <mailto:richard@richardboutwell.com>  [QuadtoneRIP] <QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com <mailto:QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com> > wrote:

 

Here is a link to information about new QTR profiling tools for dedicated black and white printers:

 

http://www.bwmastery.com/quadtoneprofiler/ 

 

I've done a lot of work automating some of the more repetitive tasks and came up with ways of using custom ink calibration images along with ColorPort or i1 Profiler for speeding up the whole process. I've automated everything from finding the ink limits for each shade, getting the exact cross over points, and generating the qidf profile. You basically just need to define the printer and the inks and then generate, print, and measure the targets. A lot of these things are similar to the standard QTR profiling approach but incorporate my methods of evenly dividing the tonal scale with the number of inks you want to use to get the best overlap for the smoothest profile. It takes something that wo uld have taken more than two hours to now being about 15-30 minutes and using a single sheet of paper.

 

One thing I am most excited about is finally solving the problem of the sharp edges in the QTR-generated curves where one ink begins and the next falls off. The Quad Curve Smoothing tool i made allows you to change the start and end points of each ink as well as change the shape each the curve while maintaining the same general ink density as the original curves. These things still need final linearization so I spruced up my QuadLin curve linearization tools.  It now has an even more advanced curve linearization to change the shape of the final density curve that doesn't rely on the QTR Linearize-quad app. The new version also uses measurements of 51-step targets that are interpolated to 128 control points for the correction curve, lookup, and new quad value calculations. (I even put in an option for my own d ata smoo thing function for really noisy data that you might get from a SpyderPrint device). The instructions have methods for easily getting multiple samples from the spyder print and a 51x4 averaging and graphing tool for checking for linearity and using the QuadLin tools. 

 

These things were all supposed to be part of the larger QTR book, but they kind of took on a life of their own over the past few months and I wanted to get them out there while I finish up editing, making screen shots and designing my QTR book. I am charging a little for the tools, but honestly that is the only way I could justify all the time I put into it, and to offset any support time for it in the future.

 

If you use the code QuadTonePro at checkout you'll get $15 off through the end of November.

 

Anyway, I hope this is useful and that no o ne get&# 39;s too offended by the sales pitch...

 

All the best,

Richard Boutwell

 

http://www.richardboutwell.com/

http://www.bwmastery.com/quadtoneprofiler/

> On Nov 2, 2016, at 3:18 AM, richard@richardboutwell.com [QuadtoneRIP] <QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Thank you everyone for the comments. Brian, I put your questions in bold and responded below. It got long, even after some cutting...
> 
> ''Richard and I had an off-forum conversation about when you charge for something and when you don't.  It's possible that his hesitancy in posting his new for-sale tool-set reflects that conversation, but if so then it shouldn't.  My view, FWIW, is that anyone can charge for anything, they just have to be able to demonstrate the value.  
> 
> I didn’t hold off selling these earlier because of those conversations. But, as I said then, I wanted to make sure whatever I put out was in a state that I was happy with and proud of. I am proud of these, but of course there is more I wish I could have done before releasing them. I really thought they would have been done a month earlier, and  I was dead set on getting them out before the end of Oct. I am happy with the functionality for its intended use as it is. From here I will spend some time working on the rest of the QTR book and will introduce updates as I get feedback from people who have already bought it. Then I will start to introduce some of the additional features I've been dreaming up. Basically, if I didn't get it out as it is now, I might never have, and that wouldn't be fair to people this could end up helping. 
> 
> I did consider releasing some of the previous versions of some of these tools for free but was advised against it, and the time answering questions and fixing problems would not have been worth it. That is one reason I made the QuadLin stuff a service when I introduced it a few years ago. There was some hand tweaking and even more manual copying and pasting that would have just been too complicated and annoying for people—free or paid. I was able to make the correction curve tools available for free because they were relatively easy to make and there was very little that could go wrong with the formulas or the copying and pasting.
> 
> ''I haven't read all of the information about Richard's new tool-set yet, but my initial impression is that the value appears to be there.   There certainly appears to be a lot of effort and ingenuity there, and he understands the curve creation process as well as anyone and better than most.   Since this is a stand-alone product, I assume that there is a perpetual license (and a year of updates), unlike the forthcoming IJM tool-set which has a fairly hefty annual license fee (although all references to that seem to have vanished, so I can't be sure that that's still the case).
> 
> Thank you, I spent a long time working this stuff out for myself and tested lots of different methods and learned a lot about stuff I never intended to along the way.
> 
> Format and pricing:  I struggled a long time with how to price these tools and what format they should be in—including how much trouble I should go through trying to generate user licenses, serial numbers, and unlock codes, or or if I should just make it a software-as-a-service web app hidden behind a paywall. I decided that was all too much work for as small of a niche this QTR stuff is, and it would end up just being a little too user hostile…
> 
> So yes, once you have the download you can use it for as long as you want without too much restriction (basically you can’t start a profiling service using these tools or make copies to sell or hand out to other people). Basically, I ask that people pay the license so I can justify the time I’ve already spent on it and any time I spend making it better (and the time it takes for email support and spending a few hours responding to questions on forums. Maybe I’m asking too little after all….) jk, I do realize how I would react if this these tools three or four times the price. I would just build my own… 
> 
> ''In another recent thread I asked about split-tone K3 recipes.  As I have a current interest in K3 curves, I could well be interested in the new toolset.  I noted a current thread on Lula in which you (Richard) said that the initial release is only for monochrome inksets.  I'm a bit puzzled by that.  You mean that you can 't use the current release at all for K3, or is it just that the toning components are missing, so that any curves you built would be warm curves without toners?  I suspect the latter.  Will K3 be a separate release, or an extension of the current release?
> 
> The current release is for 1-6 partitioned gray inks only, and it does not have options for the toner partitions yet. There are several reasons for this, but mostly I needed to consider how different people will use the toner partitions with some of the automated features in the current tools. For instance, I’ve made profiles that have 4 carbon gray inks and two selenium (like shade 5 and 2) as toner inks that run under the whole scale, and I have plans on testing a K6+CMY ink set in the coming months. Something like would be cool to be able to do with the automated tools, but isn’t really applicable to people working with the OEM inks. basically, i don’t have a good solution yet, but it wasn’t a big enough reason to hold back releasing it—especially considering that so many people are only using single tinted systems like the Eboni or Piezography K6 or P2 ones and I spent a lot of time privately and publicly trying to fix problems that arise from the some of the QTR methods. This was just a way to solve some problems before people threw their printers off the roof. 
> 
> I mentioned elsewhere that I am considering making these two completely different profiling systems—One for OEM Epson K3+C,M,Y,lc,lm,(o,g) and premade toner curve options, and one for dedicated black and white ink sets with custom toner partition options. They are really different products for different kinds of users. K3+color profiles are less demanding and are easier to make than profiles with more than 4 gray inks, and one the goals of these profiling tools was make creating K4-K6 profiles easier and to solve some of the problems with the nature of QTR-generated curves (sharp corners of the curves, and banding in the gradients). 
> 
> 
> As for software, will these tools work in LibreOffice Calc?  I gather there is some compatibility.  Did you consider building this in Calc, given that it's free and cross-platform?
> 
> I downloaded LibreOffice and tried opening a few of the files with Calc. It crashed repeatedly. Honestly, I didn’t try to build these with an open source spreadsheet app because these tools started out in Excel as personal profiling tools going back to 2010-2011. I kept extending and modifying them until it got to this point. I am not opposed to recreating them with Libre Calc, and i’ll look into it, but I have to consider how long it would take basically rebuilding everything from scratch. At that point it might be better to just make a stand alone profiling app… 
> 
> ''As an old die-hard Measure Tool hold-out, I understand I'd have to create my own MT-compatible charts manually.  Such is the lot of an old die-hard.
> I was an old MeasureTool holdout too, but I don’t think you can make custom targets from CGATS reference files with the free demo mode of ProfileMaker5. ColorPort works well, especially if you are using older measurement devices, but it still requires a reference file for the measurements. the reference files actually make working with i1 Profiler worse so I just manually define the chart structure and measure in strip mode. I started having a problem with i1 Profiler a few days ago when I went to make some screen recording videos and am still trying to sort that out. Honestly though, the more I work with ColorPort, the better I feel about it. The only problem I see with it is that it just doesn’t work with the newest measurement devices. 
> 
> Anyway, this is long enough an it is way past my bedtime. 
> 
> Cheers, 
> Richard Boutwell
> 
> http://www.richardboutwell.com/ <http://www.richardboutwell.com/>
> http://www.bwmastery.com/ <http://www.bwmastery.com/>
> 
> 
> 
>

From: QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com [mailto:QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 02, 2016 7:16 AM
To: QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [QuadtoneRIP] New Automated QTR Profiling Tools

 

  

In my opinion, Richard’s tool is underpriced for how many support emails he’ll be getting asking questions about how to use it . . (or how to make curves or DNs!) . unless he assumes we’ll all support it on this forum for free?  Or on IJM’s forum? Or DigBlackAndWhite? This seems like a cost-neutral thing or possibly a money-loser at $40.00. 

 

 

Piezography Professional Edition is a continually upgraded and modified toolset and support license (gives access to a private support forum for users who need direct a timely service as we are an internationally distributed company with many Piezo labs and artists doing printing every day needing custom support) and also it pays for continual Piezo master curve and tool development and documentation. It’s also cost-neutral (we calculated this) at $150.00 so I have no idea how Richard came up with $40.00 . . . there are a lot of factors to think about when releasing software or service or support beyond just the initial labor. Releasing something into the world costs money after someone has bought it. They expect documentation and support and compatibility with their version of Excel, etc etc etc. Some of this is directly reflected in this thread, and should be actually posted on a support forum that is no the QTR support forum but that does not exist (and that would cost time and labor and money to set up). You see what I mean?

 

best,

-Walker

 

 

On Nov 2, 2016, at 3:18 AM, richard@richardboutwell.com <mailto:richard@...>  [QuadtoneRIP] <QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com <mailto:QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com> > wrote:

 

 

Thank you everyone for the comments. Brian, I put your questions in bold and responded below. It got long, even after some cutting...

 

''Richard and I had an off-forum conversation about when you charge for something and when you don't.  It's possible that his hesitancy in posting his new for-sale tool-set reflects that conversation, but if so then it shouldn't.  My view, FWIW, is that anyone can charge for anything, they just have to be able to demonstrate the value.  

 

I didn’t hold off selling these earlier because of those conversations. But, as I said then, I wanted to make sure whatever I put out was in a state that I was happy with and proud of. I am proud of these, but of course there is more I wish I could have done before releasing them. I really thought they would have been done a month earlier, and  I was dead set on getting them out before the end of Oct. I am happy with the functionality for its intended use as it is. From here I will spend some time working on the rest of the QTR book and will introduce updates as I get feedback from people who have already bought it. Then I will start to introduce some of the additional features I've been dreaming up. Basically, if I didn't get it out as it is now, I might never have, and that wouldn't be fair to people this could end up helping. 

 

I did consider releasing some of the previous versions of some of these tools for free but was advised against it, and the time answering questions and fixing problems would not have been worth it. That is one reason I made the QuadLin stuff a service when I introduced it a few years ago. There was some hand tweaking and even more manual copying and pasting that would have just been too complicated and annoying for people—free or paid. I was able to make the correction curve tools available for free because they were relatively easy to make and there was very little that could go wrong with the formulas or the copying and pasting.

 

''I haven't read all of the information about Richard's new tool-set yet, but my initial impression is that the value appears to be there.   There certainly appears to be a lot of effort and ingenuity there, and he understands the curve creation process as well as anyone and better than most.   Since this is a stand-alone product, I assume that there is a perpetual license (and a year of updates), unlike the forthcoming IJM tool-set which has a fairly hefty annual license fee (although all references to that seem to have vanished, so I can't be sure that that's still the case).

 

Thank you, I spent a long time working this stuff out for myself and tested lots of different methods and learned a lot about stuff I never intended to along the way.

 

Format and pricing:  I struggled a long time with how to price these tools and what format they should be in—including how much trouble I should go through trying to generate user licenses, serial numbers, and unlock codes, or or if I should just make it a software-as-a-service web app hidden behind a paywall. I decided that was all too much work for as small of a niche this QTR stuff is, and it would end up just being a little too user hostile…

 

So yes, once you have the download you can use it for as long as you want without too much restriction (basically you can’t start a profiling service using these tools or make copies to sell or hand out to other people). Basically, I ask that people pay the license so I can justify the time I’ve already spent on it and any time I spend making it better (and the time it takes for email support and spending a few hours responding to questions on forums. Maybe I’m asking too little after all….) jk, I do realize how I would react if this these tools three or four times the price. I would just build my own… 

 

''In another recent thread I asked about split-tone K3 recipes.  As I have a current interest in K3 curves, I could well be interested in the new toolset.  I noted a current thread on Lula in which you (Richard) said that the initial release is only for monochrome inksets.  I'm a bit puzzled by that.  You mean that you can 't use the current release at all for K3, or is it just that the toning components are missing, so that any curves you built would be warm curves without toners?  I suspect the latter.  Will K3 be a separate release, or an extension of the current release?

 

The current release is for 1-6 partitioned gray inks only, and it does not have options for the toner partitions yet. There are several reasons for this, but mostly I needed to consider how different people will use the toner partitions with some of the automated features in the current tools. For instance, I’ve made profiles that have 4 carbon gray inks and two selenium (like shade 5 and 2) as toner inks that run under the whole scale, and I have plans on testing a K6+CMY ink set in the coming months. Something like would be cool to be able to do with the automated tools, but isn’t really applicable to people working with the OEM inks. basically, i don’t have a good solution yet, but it wasn’t a big enough reason to hold back releasing it—especially considering that so many people are only using single tinted systems like the Eboni or Piezography K6 or P2 ones and I spent a lot of time privately and publicly trying to fix problems that arise from the some of the QTR methods. This was just a way to solve some problems before people threw their printers off the roof. 

 

I mentioned elsewhere that I am considering making these two completely different profiling systems—One for OEM Epson K3+C,M,Y,lc,lm,(o,g) and premade toner curve options, and one for dedicated black and white ink sets with custom toner partition options. They are really different products for different kinds of users. K3+color profiles are less demanding and are easier to make than profiles with more than 4 gray inks, and one the goals of these profiling tools was make creating K4-K6 profiles easier and to solve some of the problems with the nature of QTR-generated curves (sharp corners of the curves, and banding in the gradients). 

 

 

As for software, will these tools work in LibreOffice Calc?  I gather there is some compatibility.  Did you consider building this in Calc, given that it's free and cross-platform?

 

I downloaded LibreOffice and tried opening a few of the files with Calc. It crashed repeatedly. Honestly, I didn’t try to build these with an open source spreadsheet app because these tools started out in Excel as personal profiling tools going back to 2010-2011. I kept extending and modifying them until it got to this point. I am not opposed to recreating them with Libre Calc, and i’ll look into it, but I have to consider how long it would take basically rebuilding everything from scratch. At that point it might be better to just make a stand alone profiling app… 

 

''As an old die-hard Measure Tool hold-out, I understand I'd have to create my own MT-compatible charts manually.  Such is the lot of an old die-hard.

I was an old MeasureTool holdout too, but I don’t think you can make custom targets from CGATS reference files with the free demo mode of ProfileMaker5. ColorPort works well, especially if you are using older measurement devices, but it still requires a reference file for the measurements. the reference files actually make working with i1 Profiler worse so I just manually define the chart structure and measure in strip mode. I started having a problem with i1 Profiler a few days ago when I went to make some screen recording videos and am still trying to sort that out. Honestly though, the more I work with ColorPort, the better I feel about it. The only problem I see with it is that it just doesn’t work with the newest measurement devices. 

 

Anyway, this is long enough an it is way past my bedtime. 

 

Cheers, 

Richard Boutwell

 

http://www.richardboutwell.com/

http://www.bwmastery.com/

-----Original Message-----
From: wattsies67@... [QuadtoneRIP] <QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com>
To: QuadtoneRIP <QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wed, Nov 2, 2016 4:32 pm
Subject: Re: [QuadtoneRIP] New Automated QTR Profiling Tools



  
    
                  
Wlaker, IJM provides both the inks and various tools to run the piezography inksets which it sells as a turnkey solution, with many promises about its performance and comparative advantages to other approaches.  It's not an inexpensive solution.  Nor would you expect it to be.  Clearly it has taken a lot of research and development to produce and in the early days of digital printing it provided a hope for a black and white solution that didn't otherwise appear available in the digital paradigm.  Where it makes sense, it is an excellent product in many respects.  I used the selenium inks for a few years, but unfortunately I don't print often enough that I can overcome the frustration of the ink settling issues in printers like the 3880.


However, I think there is a fair difference between a company like IJM and what Richard is doing which as I understand it is basically making available some tools he has dev eloped on a "see how you go with these" basis and is seeking to recover some reward for the effort he has made creating them.  Richard also has a day job.  I certainly wouldn't expect a lot of aftermarket care for the outlay involved, although I am sure Richard will provide that through various channels as he has been pretty helpful in his contribution to this and other forums to date.


The main thing here is that we have a number of very valid alternatives for digital black and white printing and are fortunate to have people who continue to develop products and solutions which they are prepared to share with all of us, often on pretty affordable terms.  More importantly, the knowledge that people are prepared to share on forums like this enable us to all become better at our craft. 


Richard, I'm looking forward to your book and to your tools for the K3 OEM inks.


J ason

> On Nov 2, 2016, at 2:32 PM, wattsies67@... [QuadtoneRIP] <QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
> 
> Wlaker, IJM provides both the inks and various tools to run the piezography inksets which it sells as a turnkey solution, with many promises about its performance and comparative advantages to other approaches.  It's not an inexpensive solution.  Nor would you expect it to be.  Clearly it has taken a lot of research and development to produce and in the early days of digital printing it provided a hope for a black and white solution that didn't otherwise appear available in the digital paradigm.  Where it makes sense, it is an excellent product in many respects.  I used the selenium inks for a few years, but unfortunately I don't print often enough that I can overcome the frustration of the ink settling issues in printers like the 3880.
> 
> 
> However, I think there is a fair difference between a company like IJM and what Richard is doing which as I understand it is basically making available some tools he has developed on a "see how you go with these" basis and is seeking to recover some reward for the effort he has made creating them.  Richard also has a day job.  I certainly wouldn't expect a lot of aftermarket care for the outlay involved, although I am sure Richard will provide that through various channels as he has been pretty helpful in his contribution to this and other forums to date.
> 
> The main thing here is that we have a number of very valid alternatives for digital black and white printing and are fortunate to have people who continue to develop products and solutions which they are prepared to share with all of us, often on pretty affordable terms.  More importantly, the knowledge that people are prepared to share on forums like this enable us to all become better at our craft. 
> 
> Richard, I'm looking forward to your book and to your tools for the K3 OEM inks.
> 
> Jason
> 
> 
>