Continually trying to improve my printing, I'm reading two different books on the subject "Fine Art Printing for Photographers" by Uwe Steinmueller and Juergen Gulbins and "The Digital Print" by Jeff Schewe. They appear to diverge on one step that I find curious. Steinmueller and Gulbins advocate determining the native black point and white point of particular paper/printer combinations, then using Levels to compress the white and black point of image files that exceed that range prior to soft proofing and printing. Schewe doesn't appear to advocate that step (or I may have missed it) and instead appears to rely on black point compensation, paper color profiles and rendering intents to make acceptable adjustments. This raises a couple questions.
1. Does the automated black point adjustment work the same way as compressing the blacks using levels?
2. What about the white point? Do both Relative and Perceptual rendering intents compress that assuming I have a good quality paper profile?
3. I suppose there might be some advantage to even further adjustments. For example, looking at my color profiles with ColorSync, I can see that the blacks actually terminate several points darker in the blue space. If I were to adjust the RGB of my files to 6-6-6, for example, that doesn't appear like it would get me the darkest tone I can reach appears to be something more like R4 G4 B8. That presumably could also have follow on affects achieving more accurate colors using whatever math Perceptual uses to render its print files. Or maybe I'm over thinking that for tone - maybe it could just result in a slight unwanted color shifts and I should stay with the pure black tone. Dunno and am just starting to test this out but interested if there were any thoughts out there on this.
Probably differences without much practical affect if any, but as I'm still learning, adding 15 or so of these tweaks into a printing workflow can have a practical affect.