Making a fine Piezography print

A new Piezography Chronicle has been produced on the basics of making a fine Piezography print. Piezography does not take any particular skill that is not required to make a competent print with an OEM solution. Having said that, not everyone can make a print using the OEM solution in a competent manner. This PDF is “basics” that covers the steps you need to take to begin using Piezography, so that Piezography can begin to support your images with its inherent beauty, smoothness, and superior print qualities. This PDF covers subjects like scanning, calibration, workflow, usage of...Read more

QTR User Guide for Mac updated

I’ve updated the Piezography QuadTone RIP K7/K6 User Manual for Macintosh. While we try to warn users NOT to rely on the standard QTR manual that is part of the QTR package, it is not because Roy Harrington’s excellent manual is anything but excellent. Rather it is because Piezography K7/K6 is NOT COMPATIBLE with normal QuadTone RIP workflow. The main reason is because of the way in which I engineer K7/K6 curves. I do not use the QuadTone RIP Curves tool. I use my own software that then compiles the curves into code that QTR can use when printing. I adhere strictly to a Gamma 2.2...Read more

Generic profiles? Not!

K7 curves have always been outstanding on the widest range of printers. They cannot be characterized as “generic”. Because there are seven shades of ink, the amount of overlapping inks makes for a set of curves that is more generous to sub-standard printers than would be a 3 ink or 4 ink curve. Because each density point in a K7 curve is comprised of so many inks, it allows for more printer anomalies to occur before the need for custom profiling. But, I take it one level higher. Piezography K7 curves are unique in that I design them with back sloping curves. Most traditional QTR...Read more

Digital negatives

I created my own digital film system for making negatives, back-lits, and film positives on an Epson R2400 printer. Where it usually takes several days to create the QTR master curves architecture for a new printer, this took weeks. The problem is that affordable auto-scan film densitometers are not currently available, or it would be easy to release systems for all the current printers. I had sourced a refirbished X-Rite DTP32 for about $1,200. This is a transmissive strip reader that measures only a few densities at a time. I found that in measuring 16 densities at a time, it performs...Read more

Which printer?

Here is a rundown on all the printers which we currently support with Piezography products. Piezography K7 curves have a way of evening out all the printers. We far exceed what Epson is capable of getting out of their own printers. You do not need to spend more money to get better image quality. You may wish to spend more money to get more Piezography features. One thing in common between all the printers we currently support is that they do need to be in top condition. Piezography does not use the same dithering that the Epson driver uses. We are able to drive a printer at higher resolution...Read more

Piezography resolution in comparison to Epson ABW

When Epson released their ABW system, we produced a test that would help show one of the significant differences between using six or seven shades of Piezography black ink in comparison to using only the three shades of Epson ABW. Epson enhances the perception of their black & white inkjet printing by adding dots of cyan, magenta and yellow ink to the three blacks. But, this does not increase the ability of three blacks to resolve resolution and detail. We created a file of incredible resolution – the text of Alice in Wonderland reduced to 1pt size would replicate a high resolution...Read more

The state of the art

I get a lot of questions asking what is the state of the art in Piezography. In other words, what produces the absolute best Piezography results? As unbelievable as it seems, Piezography K7 and K6 curves for the $50 shareware QuadTone RIP produce a better result than the profiles produced in StudioPrint RIP which is the only professional RIP to directly support Piezography inks and costs as much as $2,300. We wrote the profiler that is used to produce the curves for our inks in QuadTone RIP. For printer platforms, the Epson 4880, 7880 and 9880 are the best performing Piezography printers to...Read more

Scanning workflow

Because K7 is designed to separate the gray values between 0 and 255, you should calibrate your imaging techniques to a dMin of 255 and dMax of 0. As elementary as this sounds, many users mostly automate the use of their scanners and cameras, and their Photoshop workflows without regard to controlling the process. Turn off scanner automation in the software that you use to run your scanner. Some of the options in Preferences as an example, will automatically perform a type of “levels” to make the lightest pixel a white point, and the darkest pixel a black point. While this might...Read more