There are several "how to" guides out there on making digital negatives. Some of these go a first step of determining the blocking power of the different inks used. The QTR-based approach that's advocates by e.g. Sandy King et al. is one of them. You basically print a number of colored gradients, one for each individual ink, then print those with the target process and assess the results for the desired blocking power.
Red as such is a bit of an unlikely color to come up since many printers don't print red ink (newer ones sometimes do), and when it comes to IV blocking power, it's usually black and yellow inks that perform the best. As a result, you tend to get a lot of yellowish looking negatives in the alt process corner. Red would imply yellow and magenta are used, which generally isn't all that beneficial compared to just yellow (black is generally in the mix by default, since it's nearly always a good UV blocker).
Surprisingly, correlation between color and blocking power is not as logical as one would think. It is very specific to the printer and inks it is using. In my old HP B9180, green was decidedly the best blocking color. Seems adding cyan/blue to yellow increased the UV opacity from that the latter alone would give, which is counter-intuitive. I just checked my negatives printed by Dan Burkholder on an Epson (don't remember which one) in one of his Formulary workshops that I took and it is greenish. He was the first one to use colorized negatives, I think. I believe some of the early dye based printers (like Epson 1280) did have red as the best blocking color. I remember seeing an early article - don't recall by whom.
Nowadays when you see generally B&W negatives, it is because in the newer printers, the black (PK and MK) densities have improved significantly that they do pretty good job of blocking UV for pretty much all alt processes. In higher end-Epsons, in addition, there is a facility to dial in more than 100% ink, if further density is required. Older printers didn't do adequate job with black only inks so people had to resort to finding a combination of other inks that displayed greater UV opacity.
What I would recommend is first print a step-wedge using your normal black ink and see if the density is adequate to get you a paper white (or near) step 0 using your standard printing time. If that's the case, and it might be depending on the process (cyanotypes for example don't require the density that a salt print would,) you are good to go. If not, first see if you can increase the ink load within the printer driver itself and test again. Or use MK, which generally has a higher UV density. You might have to get one of the more expensive transparencies (like Pictorico Ultra Premium) to handle those two options. If that does not do the job, then go the colorized negative route using the Peter Mrhar's approach as linked by @Andrew Keedle and see if there is a non-black color in the palette that has higher UV opacity. Finally, if your printer allows use of QTRip (meaning its one of the supported Epsons) which can control both individual inks and their loading to find the best combination - but that is much more involved with steep learning curve (personal experience) so I would use it only if all else fails.
:Niranjan.
The print dialog has changed and no longer shows Print Settings > Color Matching or Print Settings > Printer Settings. There's no way to get to Advanced Color Settings which allowed adding a color tint to prints. Does anyone have a solution?
Hi Frank,Mac or PC? From the info you supplied, I am guessing Mac, if not ignore the next sentence or two.
Are you sure that you have the full driver, direct from Epson (another guess) and not the dumbed down AirPrint driver from Apple? In my experience (helping others with Macs, I am primary a Windows user) this is often the cause of missing features when going to print.
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