articles/Paper/fourbaryt-page7
by Mike McNamee Published 01/06/2010
Monochrome AuditBaryta papers are generally well favoured by the monochrome fraternity and so we usually explore the performance of test media using the Epson Advanced Black and White Driver (ABW). For the Canson we had some form to go on. Adobe's Eric Chan had posted an interesting discourse on his website for the use of special profiles to soft-proof using the ABW driver, something that is not normally possible. His profiles strip the colour data away and simply provide the reference monochrome grey ramp for driving the screen view in Photoshop. Given that we wished to use his profile (see http://people.csail.mit.edu/ericchan/dp/Epson3800/ abwprofiles.html) we decided to use his settings which are different to those we used for the colour testing. The Chan profiles were built for PGPP and Dark for the ABW tone setting, along with 2880dpi, no High Speed and with default Paper Config settings. We stayed with these settings, but did use the Rear Manual loading tray.
The soft proofing indicated detail in the shadows at 5 RGB points and highlight detail at 252 points on a calibrated CRT monitor. Did it look like the print? Well, partly! The shadow and highlight values were reproduced but the overall view on the monitor was lighter than the print appeared. It was the Granger Chart which caused the most concern. The soft proof indicated that the Granger Chart had typical structure to it, but the printed result was a straight linear gradient (see diagram showing the print and the screen view). Try as we would we did not find the cause or solution but we continue to work at it. We did note that the Dmax had been pushed out to 2.67, but the print was overall 4 ½% too dark. The overall uncertainty drove us to perform a full ring-around of the ABW settings to set an accurate baseline.
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