QTR and K7 Selenium set for 7600

Has anyone produced a good QTR profile for making digital negatives with the Piezography K7 selenium set for the Epson 4000 or 7600? I have an Epson 7600 and am thinking of setting it up with the K7 selenium set (plus MSN ink in shade 1 spot) for printing on Pictorico. Looking for any advice from people who may be using this combination for making digital negatives.

Sandy King

sanking said:

Has anyone produced a good QTR profile for making digital negatives with the Piezography K7 selenium set for the Epson 4000 or 7600? I have an Epson 7600 and am thinking of setting it up with the K7 selenium set (plus MSN ink in shade 1 spot) for printing on Pictorico. Looking for any advice from people who may be using this combination for making digital negatives.

Sandy King

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Sandy,

The Digital Black & White list on Yahoo will be the best place to pose your question, IMO. They are an old and veneralble group of monochrome digital practitioners such as Tyler Boley and Jon Cone, just to name two names.

Don

Dear Sandy,

I was using the first version / old Piezography Selenium tone inkset with Pictorico and Ultrafine Crystal Clear media years ago. The inks were very fragile (and sometimes transfer onto the coated paper) on both of these transparencies. They were fine otherwise. Test before committing!

Regards,
Loris.

Loris Medici said:

Dear Sandy,

I was using the first version / old Piezography Selenium tone inkset with Pictorico and Ultrafine Crystal Clear media years ago. The inks were very fragile (and sometimes transfer onto the coated paper) on both of these transparencies. They were fine otherwise. Test before committing!

Regards,
Loris.

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Loris,

Jon Cone addressed this issue on the Large Format Photography Forum recently. Their ink formulation has changed and Jon addressed to Sandy what ink combo to use for transparencies and ink jet prints, hence the Selenium inkset.

Don

Don Bryant said:

Loris,

Jon Cone addressed this issue on the Large Format Photography Forum recently. Their ink formulation has changed and Jon addressed to Sandy what ink combo to use for transparencies and ink jet prints, hence the Selenium inkset.

Don

Click to expand...

That is correct, and a fellow named Paul at Renaissance Press is using this set with an Epson 7800 to make negatives (or positives I guess it would be?) for photogravure work. The K7 selenium set is generally sold is for printing on matte papers, but for printing on film Jon Cone recommends using a black they call MSN in position one in place of the regular shade one ink.

I am pretty sure it will not be all that difficult to create a good profile for carbon printing. Profiles already exist that print with good linearity on specific media, but not on Pictorico.

Sandy

Wow, that's niceee! I'll be thinking about K7 selenium inkset if I ever obtain a printer that is capable of using it then...

Regards,
Loris.

Don Bryant said:

Sandy,

The Digital Black & White list on Yahoo will be the best place to pose your question, IMO. They are an old and veneralble group of monochrome digital practitioners such as Tyler Boley and Jon Cone, just to name two names.

Don

Click to expand...

Tyler Boley has a great reputation for inkjet printing but so far as I know he never worked with digital negatives. I had a good exchange of pms with Jon Cone that was very helpful, but he does not have profiles for Pictorico for the 7600. He suggested that I could take the master profile for the 4000, which has the same ink set, and adjust it for the 7600. I don't think this will be too difficult, especially now that I understand the role of gama adjustment, thanks to Ron and Clay.

Sandy

That's pretty interesting news. I like the concept of a digital neg printer with a largely monochrome inkset. I ran an 1800 that way for a while with hand filled cartridges using mixed Epson blacks and yellow. Worked pretty well but hard to keep the mixtures consistent.

Do you think the 7600 will hack it, Sandy? I was under the impression that people had found that generation of printers too prone to banding? Nice if it works as they are cheap and indestructible.

Ben Altman said:

That's pretty interesting news. I like the concept of a digital neg printer with a largely monochrome inkset. I ran an 1800 that way for a while with hand filled cartridges using mixed Epson blacks and yellow. Worked pretty well but hard to keep the mixtures consistent.

Do you think the 7600 will hack it, Sandy? I was under the impression that people had found that generation of printers too prone to banding? Nice if it works as they are cheap and indestructible.

Click to expand...

Ben,

The attraction of Piezography for digital negatives is based on the fact that one gets higher resolution in printing in monochrome with the Piezography inks that uses seven shades of black than with color inks. At one time I owned an Epson 2200 and verified this for myself with a K7 Piezography set, though unfortunately it did not work for my digital negatives b because the inks did not stick well to Pictorico and other OHPs.

There is a good probability that the banding issue with that generation of printers, which included the 2200, 4000, 7600 and 9600, will be eliminated with the use of seven shades of black. But even if banding is not entirely eliminated I tend to print images in carbon transfer that don't show the artifacts of banding. For example, the type of image that works best for me in carbon is one that has an abundance of texture and detail and avoids large areas of smooth tonal values. I made many very nice carbon prints from negatives from the Epson 2200 by choice of image, even though the printer did produce banding in there were even tonal areas of very high Dmax on the negative.

In any event this is not much of a risk for me as the cost of the printer and setting it up with the Piezography set worked out to be less than the price of a new Epson 3880, and I can always use it to make high quality matte inkjet prints up to twenty-four inches wide!!

Sandy

I've wanted to do something like this for a while, but with a second 3880 and the warm neutral K7 inks. The $300 rebate on the 3880 goes a ways in covering the 4oz K7 set, but still just too steep right now. Anyway, really looking forward to hearing how it works out for you, I hadn't thought of trying an older printer model.

Sounds like it's worth a try, Sandy. I have a old 7600 sitting around, but it needs some fixing - have the parts but it has not been a priority... so I'll be interested to hear how it goes.

Colin - I think it's a lot easier to use 3rd party inks with the older printers - I understand you need special carts for the 38XX series =$$. At least that was the case when I checked into it a while back.

Slightly off thread:

I know we're talking about these particular inksets here, but I understand that the Cone K7 Color inkset is pretty incredible, for those who print in color, and you can replace the Epson K7 one at a time when they run out with no discernible differences. That's pretty amazing...

Due to travel and workshops progress has been slow on converting the 7600 over to the Piezography K7 Selenium set. However, after making sure that the printing head was completely clear, and replacing the flushing box and maintenance box on the printer, I finally made the change-over this past evening. Everything went pretty much as described in the InkjetMall installation procedures and after the change I was able to flush out the old UC inks and print a good nozzle check.

Before making the conversion I printed a resolution target to compare the Epson driver with QTR with the Epson UC inks installed. The printer was set to 2880 dpi for both drivers, and the file of the target was printed at 360 dpi, 720 dpi and 1440 dpi at the printing size. Resolution with the Epson driver was about 7 lp/mm when printing with the file set at 360 dpi, and did not improve at either 720 dpi or 1440 dpi. Resolution printing with QTR was also about 7 lp/mm when printing with the file resolution at 360 dpi, but improved to about 12 lp/mm when printing with the file set at 720 dpi, with no additional improvement at 1440 dpi.

One of my first comparison tests with the Piezography inks installed will be to repeat the comparison of the target printing with QTR. The purpose is to test the claim that Piezography printed with QTR gives higher resolution than the Epson UC inks. Once this comparison is finished I will proceed to working on a QTR profile for carbon printing.

Sandy

That's a really interesting test, Sandy. Did you use the Ordered dither, or one of the others?
I wonder if other printers show the same improvement from Epson driver to QTR - the 3800 Epson driver was a big improvement over earlier models, if I recall, so maybe it's now equal to or better than QTR(?).

Thanks for doing this and letting us know your results!

Ben

Ben,

I used the Ordered dither pattern, which is the default setting in the QTR driver.

Sandy

sanking said:

One of my first comparison tests with the Piezography inks installed will be to repeat the comparison of the target printing with QTR. The purpose is to test the claim that Piezography printed with QTR gives higher resolution than the Epson UC inks. Once this comparison is finished I will proceed to working on a QTR profile for carbon printing.

Sandy

Click to expand...

OK, I did a comparison test with the Piezograhy K7 Selenium Ink Set installed, printing with QTR, and sharpness was very good, slightly better than with the Epson UC inks when printing with 2880 dpi and Unidirectional printing. The improvement was not as dramatic as I had hoped, but at this point I am getting a solid 14 lp/mm on Epson enhanced matte, which is more than twice the threshold of human resolution so probably good enough.

Once I get a good profile for digital negatives I will do a similar test on Pictorico. This has proven to be a bit more complicated than I anticipated because the K7 QTR profiles can not be edited with regular QTR tools.

Sandy

Sandy.

Have you considered making a QTR-curve with the tools avaliable in QTR *instead of a custom curve from Inkjetmall? I have the Piezography Selenium K7/MPS on an Epson 3800, and even if the custom curves from Inkjetmall are really good I do not like to give away the fun of making profiles/curves myself.

In fact, yesterday I sent custom profiling targets for the papers Harman (by Hahnemuhle) Gloss Baryta (former FB Al) and Art Fibre Baryta for Epson 3800. If anyone needs these curves let me know

I am sad that the Bowhaus IJC/OPM support does not have support for all the ink channels on the 3800, it only supports seven of them. I really love the user interface of IJC/OPM and it is really sweet to make profiles. I have made both prints and digital negatives with this software.

I got my hands on two (cheap) Epson 7600 and I will also convert these to BW printing, using Piezography ink. If I manage to start making carbon transfer prints again, I would definetly make one of them a dedicated digital negative printer. So it is interesting to hear how the 7600/K7 setup works for you.
I might use IJC/OPM instead if I cannot find easy ways to customize QTR-curves.

My carbon transfer projects (as you might know) have been on hold since I had my workshop flooded with waste water in october 2008. All my equipment was destroyed, and I did not have the energy to fight the insurance company.

eibr said:

Sandy.

Have you considered making a QTR-curve with the tools avaliable in QTR *instead of a custom curve from Inkjetmall? I have the Piezography Selenium K7/MPS on an Epson 3800, and even if the custom curves from Inkjetmall are really good I do not like to give away the fun of making profiles/curves myself.

Click to expand...

I have considered several options, including that one. However, one of the things that attracted me to the K7 inks for the 7600 was that the overlapping shade curves of the Inkjetmall custom profiles give better sharpness, at least that is the advertised promise. If I had wanted to make my own profiles with the QTR curves I would probably have just left the Epson UC inks installed as I could easily have adapted an existing QTR profile that I used with the Epson 2200 for many years to make digital negatives for carbon printing. The UC ink set of the 7600 and the 2200 is identical so I could probably have created a good profile for the 7600 in a few days.

Also, the thing to remember about carbon printing is that you have more process controls than with most alternative processes so all I really need is a profile that will print with good linearity with a transmission Dmax anywehre between log 2.0 and log 3.0, or even higher or lower for that matter.

Meanwhile, I am working with someone to profile the 7600 with the K7 pigment inks. But we are not there yet.

Sandy

Here is a brief update on my effort to create a good working profile for the Epson 7600 with the K7 Selenium inkset from InkjetMall installed. My original intention was to edit one of the Cone Profiles for paper to work with my digital negative process but then I discovered that the Cone Profiles couldnt be edited with regular QTR tools. That was quite a surprise and rather threw me for a loop. But then I decided to contact Ben Altman with whom I had briefly worked on another QTR project a couple of years ago to see if he would look at one of the Cone profiles to see if there was any way I could load edit it. That proved to be impossible, but Ben offered to collaborate with me in creating a profile, an offer that I readily accepted.

So we started to work. First I printed an Ink Separation sheet for Ben to record, and then several preliminary trials, then finally a series of profiles in an effort to linearize a digital negative to my carbon process. We encountered a brief snag because Bens step wedges were in RGB Mode and I wanted to print in Grayscale 2.2, first because this is the recommended Mode for QTR and K7, and second, printing in Grayscale saves a lot of memory, important with very large files. Ben re-did the wedges in
Grayscale, as there is no simple conversion.


Well, after much work we finally got a profile that prints a virtually straight line and linear print from a digital negative. I just made my first carbon transfer print from this profile, and it has beautiful range of tones from the highest highlights to the deepest shadows, with very nice grain.

That is my side of the story.

Sandy

Ben adds the following.

Working with Sandy on this project has been a pleasure, and very instructive
as I develop my Excel QTR programming tools. It is quite something, I think,
that we were able to figure this out - Sandy printing tests from a program
he has not seen, providing measurements and feedback, and me programming for a printer I've never used, an inkset I've never seen, and a wet process I don't know. We never spoke on the phone the entire time!

The Cone K7 Selenium inkset, when used for an ultraviolet process, turns out
to have a very wide range of inks. The Matt Black is a very powerful
blocker, and even the second shade is substantially more dense than say the
Epson Photo Black for a 3800. At the other end of the scale the three
weakest blockers do little, or in one case nothing. I used them in the
profile mainly because Sandy found the nozzles were clogging if they were
left idle.

Although the OHP will absorb a large amount of this ink, we found that at
higher volumes we were getting peculiar artifacts. My step wedge consists of
separate squares on a mid-gray background, with a narrow white border. The
artifact is an "echo" of the border just inside the square - a line of
lighter gray in the tone of some of the squares. Also some ink combinations
were quite grainy. We eventually found our way to something that avoids bothproblems. We also had a still-unexplained change of density at one point, which required adding in a small amount of Matt Black to restore the density
- and more trial profiles.

The profile that we ended up with is very linear - about as close as one can
get within the "noise" of a hand-coated process. Sandy's Carbon process
does turn out to have a small but noticeable shoulder and toe; the profile
linearizes that nicely. I'm working on some programming to further smooth
the profiles, and to speed up the whole rigamarole.

We hope to do more tests in a few weeks time, and will post results.

Bravo Ben & Sandy!

Does this mean you are ready to print images that include clouds and sky?

Don

Very cool indeed & congrats to you both!!!

I look forward to hearing more about your efforts.

Have you made any prints yet, or has it just been test strips?

Don Bryant said:

Bravo Ben & Sandy!

Does this mean you are ready to print images that include clouds and sky?

Don

Click to expand...

Why the question about clouds and sky? I make some prints with sky and clouds but generally prefer to choose subjects for carbon transfer that take maximum advantage of the carbon process, and these are images that have a lot of mid-tone and shadow values. It is here that the carbon process is unique.

Sandy

R Shaffer said:

Very cool indeed & congrats to you both!!!

I look forward to hearing more about your efforts.

Have you made any prints yet, or has it just been test strips?

Click to expand...

There was about two months of test prints, but after finalizing the last profile two days ago and declaring victory I have now made three very nice prints.

There is still some question as to whether a better profile could not be made using PK ink, and/or different inks in the various slots. Ben and I continue to explore this in a few weeks as he perfects his program and keep looking for the holy grail of digital negatives.

Sandy

Are you guys developing a QTR-oriented spreadsheet based calculator similar to the PDN system?

clay said:

Are you guys developing a QTR-oriented spreadsheet based calculator similar to the PDN system?

Click to expand...

Hi Clay,

I've been working on-and-off on a spreadsheet approach to QTR for several years. Seems like it's coming together and can be made friendly enough for others to use, not just me - will post when I think it's Beta-ready, hopefully soon.

It's fundamentally different from PDN, which warps the image file to compensate for the differences between the manufacturers printer driver, intended for positive color prints, and the needs of a digital negative. What I do is control the individual inks through QTR (which has the capacity to do this if you strip away the standard profile tools that come with it). So instead of fighting the printer driver, I am working with it, to create a profile that is linearized internally. Also, I can use the best inks for each part of the profile, rather than trying to make one color work for the whole thing. With the profile one can print the image file as WYSIWYG, with no overlaid Photoshop curve. It may help to make an ICC profile (using QTR methods) to get the screen to look like the print. I don't believe Sandy is doing this - have not discussed that part of his work-flow.

So the approach is more similar to Ron Reeder's, except that I have precise control over every ink at 128 points. The trick is making that control quick and easy, rather than adjusting 128 points by hand on seven or eight inks Also important is a work-flow that zeros-in on the best ink combos. I'm getting close. The project with Sandy has been a good exercise in what is really needed in the work-flow.

I'm attaching a screen shot of the QTR CurveView of a profile, to give an idea how they come out. Top black line is total ink volume, colored lines are individual inks. Also a plot of UV and Carbon print densities.

Ben