Digital Negs - breaking the rules

Good day to everyone from the west corner of Europe,

I will start next week new tests to produce digital negs for Platinum/palladium print and kallitype printing.

The difference is that I do not want to exchange the matte black I use for everything else for the photo black. And the matte black has a tendency to run on the OHP Pictorico.

Equipment + material + software I will be using

Flextight 848 scanner
PowerMac G5
Epson 7800
Epson 9600
Pictorico OHP
Adobe Photoshop CS2
ImagePrint 6 (RIP software by ColorByte)

ColorByte now has profiles that allow for the use of Matte black and Photo Black on the 7800 printer. They call it Phatte Black, and the idea is to replace the light-light black cartridge by the matte black (we need also to replace the chip on the cartrigde). This would make things much easier.
Still I do not agree with them when they say that there is no difference in quality, as I believe that the new light-light black color makes a difference when printing both in color and B/W.

So I am back to square one. I want to keep the Matte black in the printer.

My idea is to print chromogenic negatives, limiting or eliminating the use of matte black.
Because the 7800 uses two more blacks, light and light-light and their drying characteristics similar to the photo black, I believe that by increasing the levels of these two inks, acceptable results may be achieved.

The Image Print software has an ink limit feature that I am planning to use for this.

Before I start throwing money out of the window, has anyone already done some research along these lines?

All help will be appreciated.

Carlos Gasparinho
Received on Fri Feb 17 05:39:17 2006