#520 Fine black and white printing.

[Luc Busquin]

I'm interested in using Gutenprint and the Gimp Enhanced Print Plugin to print 'fine art' black and white. I would like to use only the printer's black, light black, light light black inks and adjust color tone with magenta and cyan inks only. (I'm using an Epson 7900)

Is this achievable in the Enhanced print plugin UI?
Should I use Color or Grayscale output type?
Which Ink Type should I use?
Is it possible to achieve precise control of the inks using only the 'value', 'density' and 'transition' setting?

Thanks!

[Robert Krawitz]

You may be able to achieve what you want this way.

If you want to use only the gray inks for the grayscale, and use color inks only to adjust toning, what you should do is set GCR Lower Bound and GCR Upper Bound both to zero. That ensures that the grayscale is rendered only with those inks. As it happens, those are the default values on this printer (with the light light black ink, the drops are small enough so that there's no reason to use composite gray).

If you just wanted to do this, I would suggest that you select grayscale output. However, grayscale output doesn't offer toning options (it uses only the black/gray inks). So you'll need to use color output. You'll need to convert your image to grayscale, and actually apply the toning within GIMP.