To the respondents, thank you for pointing my question in directions I hadn’t been thinking about and thus giving me some new factors to consider. Mark, thank you for the mentioning the Keith Cooper test target.
I fear from what Mark wrote that either I’m underinformed about matters that are important to me (and therefore hope to get help with another reply), or that I failed to explain my workflow enough (I hope only one of these is the case, not both).
In my workflow, which almost always includes work in Photoshop (starting there with the file in either color or BW, depending on the image, how I plan to develop it, and whether I converted it in Lr before going to Ps), I always print from the BW image in Adobe RGB 16-bit, using ABW Normal set to give a neutral print. In setting up the print command, I always use “managed by printer”, which freezes the profile with sRGB (i.e., no choice of ICC profile as there would be for printing a color image). So I wonder whether, in Mark’s mentioning the use of ICC profiles in reply to my question, there’s something important I don’t know about setting up the print command for my BW images.
Also, where Mark writes: “Frankly though, we have much more control over our output using the RGB driver and softproofing through our ICC profiles,” is this a suggestion to softproof the grayscale image in Ps by selecting the paper I’m printing on (i.e., in View>Proof Setup>Custom)? Given that the image onscreen at that point is grayscale, would I not “merely” be seeing the effect of the tone of the paper (I use Premium Luster and Canson Baryta almost exclusively and know how their different tonalities will effect the print). Is such softproofing part of many BW printers’ workflows?