The best way in my opinion to load the inks is to do an initial fill from the printer menu.
A few purge charts would still be necessary to flush out all the yellow channel especially. It’s hard to get that yellow out. This is something you only want to do once as it does waste quite a bit of ink.
If I were you I would hire IJM to make you the profiles, especially if you are not needing a lot of them. Those two papers you choose are exactly what I would use. They are both excellent and my favorites of them all.
I believe you can still lease the profiling software from Cone for one year and do a bunch of them, but that really does involve a learning cure and they are experts at it.
Really learning QTR and Print Tool is super easy, and super inexpensive to buy.
Seems to me the really strong point of these inks is the subtle split-tone capability. I’m going to put them in a 3880 and do panorama work with them.
To me your neutral prints look pretty good, the cold tone looks quite strange . I’m sure you can tweak them better with a custom profile. It’s hard to judge by a screen shot though.
I can’t comment on the tonal quality of the Pro inks. I’m still using K7 Carbon which will be discontinued the end of this year, unfortunately.
John
I converted my P6000 into the Piezography Pro inkset this week. It wasn't too bad. They currently recommend against using their flush product. You just load up the inks and either do a sort of hack with maintenance software...or make a series of 'purge' prints.
I did the second method because the first requires a PC...which I have in addition to my Mac Studio but I hate windows so...I made a LOT of purge prints. Luckily I had a lot of junky paper that was given to me so no big loss there. The Yellow ink takes the longest to get out of the system but eventually it purged out.
There is a bit of a learning curve to say the least! You have to learn QTR, then learn to use Print Tool...those aren't too bad. They also recommend you calibrate your monitor to D50...or 5000k. I had been at 6500k for the longest time so it changes up the rest of the work I do to a certain extent...hopefully that isn't a huge issue long term. Then you are printing from Greyscale because you apply any color tone using QTR. You can't really soft proof...if you apply a heavy split curve in QTR and then have it 'print' to PDF, you will see nothing but the original image. You have to make prints to see what you're doing. I don't actually mind that so much...
I haven't gone into creating my own Quad curves yet...need to source a Color Munki before I do that, but the built in profiles are pretty good so not sure what I'll do there. Might just have Cone in VT do the profiling for their fee. I plan to focus on 2 papers, Platine Fiber Rag and Arches 88 from Canson.
Anyway the results so far I have to say are promising! I'm printing large format negatives scanned with my Eversmart Supreme II. 5x7 and 4x5 Adox CHS100II. The detail is impressive, and it's easy to split tone. I will say the neutral tone is noticeably cooler than a silver print on Ilford Multigrade V. I might try introducing like 10% warmth to shadows and mids to see if I can balance it. Absent other prints you might not notice that it's cool, but I'd say it's more comparable to Ilford cold-tone than neutral. A 'cool' toned print to me just looks blue. I'll need to work with the software to generate some chocolate tones as opposed to the more sepia warmth.
Anyway I included some phone snaps to show the color tone testing I'm doing. Would love to hear other's experiences with the system.