From: Nick Makris (nick@mcn.org)
Date: 09/09/03-07:53:57 AM Z
Some of you may remember my goal to find a combination of printer, ink and substrates that could be used to create both durable negs for PT/PD and high quality archival B&W prints on watercolor paper. Kind of a lofty goal, but one that I am on the verge of attaining.
It obviously boils down to the proper combination, but it's not so simple finding your way through the fog of image editing workflow, image modes, printer, ink, substrate, ICC profiles, color controls, media type selection, actual paper selection, print quality, dot gain and on and on.
Yesterday, after printing what appeared to be the most perfect step wedge of my 4 year search, I reflected on how the search process could have been simplified - so here it is in the most simplistic form I'm able to put together.
As I said in my earlier post it was the Media Type selection that through me off and I now wonder what part that may have played in my early and ongoing series of getting close but never getting the perfect print. It turns out that, at least in each of the Epson printer properties/setup dialogs, the Media Type and Print Quality have the most significant effect on the printed output. Ironically, since the real world offers a vast array of substrates, a specific media selection for any particular film or paper is usually not available - so what do you choose for the task at hand?
Even more confounding - if there is a selection that seems to be appropriate for the intended substrate, it may be the wrong one. This was brought to light yesterday when I was researching the problem of non-linear output in the most dense part of the steps. Turns out that printer X will print the greatest amount of ink on with media Type A selected and printer Y will put the least amount of ink with media Type A selected. With these kinds of variables, you need to have a plan and not one plan but one plan for each printer you may have.
Here's how to make the plan - start by finding out how much ink each Media Type prints onto a substrate known to take a lot of ink and rank them from greatest (most dense) amount to least amount. In this way you will know which media type to choose for a given task/substrate. If you get pooling/puddling or noticable dot gain on the selected substrate the plan will be less useful.
For the purpose of this first test, choose a substrate (film is better for this than paper) that will accept great amounts of ink without pooling. The claylike coated films such as the Epson Backlight and Kodak Backlit will take huge amounts of ink and so will some velums. It will be much easier to determine the most dense ink setting based on a film or velum, rather than a paper.
To make those determinations, simply make a series Photoshop image files in grayscale that consist of a simple one inch square block - the left half of which is100% black and the right half of which is 50% black. Make one file for each of the media types that your printer driver displays and name the file with that media type name. I know your saying why one for each??? Each file should have the block positioned so that you can successively pass one piece of substrate through the printer and have all the images appear in order without overlapping. Also, insert the text that suggests which media setting is represented below the block in each file.
TAKE NOTES WHILE PRINTING THESE TESTS - make sure you recoginze the amount of wet ink while it's still wet.
Driver settings:
Choose "No Color Adjustment".
Choose the appropriate Media Type.
If the Media Type allows it, choose 1440dpi or the highest it allows (more than 1440 is a waste).
Choose "Color Ink".
Once you have ranked your Media Types it is a simple matter of introducing a new substrate into your workflow. Take a piece of your new film or paper, print the the files starting with the most dense media type as determined above and stop printing them when you print one that doesn't pool/puddle or if you're into dot gain, doesn't appear to have any. That's the starting point for creating a curve and printing a step wedge for that substrate.
SIMPLE AS THAT :>)
Good luck,
Nick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : 10/01/03-03:09:00 PM Z CST