Help me find the detail in my blacks!

[dieselpowered]

Hi everyone, long time reader, first time poster. Hopefully you all can help me out. I've been printing a combination of B&W and color and while the color looks good, the B&W has had some nastily clipped blacks.

I've been printing out of Lightroom from my fancy new MacBook Pro to an Epson 7600 loaded with PK and some odd things have been happening. I calibrated by first setting the display brightness to match the brightness of my paper (about 50%, Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Baryta for B&W, some old Legion Photo Gloss for color) and then running through the drill with the iOne Match software to set it to 2.2/6500k. I know using a laptop as a reference isn't ideal, but such are the logistics of my printing situation right now. I printed the short target from iOne using Photoshop and no color managment and gave it 24 hours to dry, used it to build a profile, and then dropped the profile into my Colorsync folder so it pops up as an option in the appropriate places. (For some reason, the iOne software doesn't give me the option of printing or profiling the more extensive target. I have no idea why. It's rather irritating.)

I made my adjustments on my image in Lightroom and sent a copy of the image to Photoshop CS2 to soft proof. In CS2, the blacks looked a little grayed out, but I've come to expect that from soft proofing as I've never seen deep blacks on screen from any profile I've made. Shadows still had detail, so I was happy. I'm not sure if I'm screwing up soft proofing or if that's just how it treats blacks. (Relative, Black Point Compensation, Simulate Paper Color/Black Ink) Everything looked good, I made a tweak or two, and set things up to print in Lightroom. Under "Color Management", I selected my profile and set the rendering intent to relative. In the printer dialogue, I set it up as Premium Luster Photo Paper (260) and turned off the color management. I also upped the width of the paper as the Hahnemuhle is pretty thick. I hit print and the print looked at least a stop darker than on screen. After some Googling, I came upon this workaround for dark prints in an older version of Lightroom and gave it a try, even though it's supposed to be fixed in LR2. I went into the Colorsync utility and associated the B&W paper with the Premium Luster entry and the color paper with the Premium Gloss setting and tried again. The color prints were perfect. They still needed a tiny bit of tweaking, but it was exactly what I expected out of color managing appropriately. Using the exact same workflow and appropriate settings for the Hahnemuhle, I went to print and while the highlights seemed more or less fine and the tone was perfectly neutral, all the detail in the shadows disappeared into flat black.

Can anyone think of a setting that I'm missing or misusing? It's just so strange that the same calibration workflow would result in near-perfect prints on one paper, but garbage on the other. Should I dump Lightroom and print from Photoshop? Should I switch to something more B&W-specific like the Quadtone RIP?

[dieselpowered]

Update: I printed several test images with various paper settings in the Epson driver with no color management along with a few with my existing color management turned on (both in terms of setting the ICC profile in LR and associating it with the paper setting in Colorsync) and it looks like everything darker than about 35% is getting clipped. Yecch.

I also printed using the Hahnemuhle ICC profile (set up in both LR and Colorsync) and ended up with a much better tonal range. Now I'm beginning to wonder what might have gone wrong in profiling this paper.

[Pat Herold]

Here are a few ideas:
-  There is a bug concerning Photoshop and Epson drivers on Macs whereby you may think you have color management turned off in the driver, but it is still going on.  It may help if you confirm that CM is actually turned off.  More on that here:
http://www.colorwiki.com/wiki/Tech_Support_Grab_Bag

-  I have heard that while LR uses profiles correctly, there is not a true way to turn CM off in LR.  So you should avoid printing out your profiling targets through LR.  Use Photoshop instead.

-  You may not be able to get the shadow detail you want using an i1Pro spectrophotometer.  In our profiling service in house we have found that we can coax more detail out of matte and canvas surfaces by measuring them with a SpectraScan table using a polarizing filter.  The filter does a good job of limiting stray light from giving false readings which make the profile "lighter" than it should be.

[Arkady]

I calibrated by first setting the display brightness to match the brightness of my paper (about 50%, Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Baryta for B&W, some old Legion Photo Gloss for color)

could you elaborate how did you do the brightness match?

Hahnemuhle, I went to print and while the highlights seemed more or less fine and the tone was perfectly neutral, all the detail in the shadows disappeared into flat black.

What light source/box do you use? Did you try to look at prints under brighter light?