Question about Black Level / UCR setting

[perkin-warbeck]

I started a trial of PrintFab today. I successfully installed the Epson SC P-700 driver and can now print with PrintFab through the Photoshop plugin.

I use my P700 for printing digital negatives, and I am interested in the PrintFab settings that will make the best quality digital negatives. When I print negatives with the Epson driver, tones in the darkest parts of the negative are grainy at high Color Density settings, which degrades the quality of the print highlights. If I could print these dark tones with less black and more color inks, I think it would make them smoother. The settings on the Ink Ctrl tab seem like they should let me do this. But I am not able to adjust the UCR slider. I have tried many combinations of setting in the other tabs, but the UCR slider (as well as the Bright Cyan and Bright Magenta sliders) remain grayed out. Here are my other PrintFab settings:

Paper: Premium Luster
Color Mode: Gray Photo
Intent: Colorimetric Relative Blackpoint Compensation (corresponds to how I usually print with the Epson driver)
Color Space: Adobe RGB (1998)

The manual has a note that says: "This control [the Black Level / UCR slider] is only available if pure black ink can be used." So I am wondering if this is simply a limitation of the P700.

EDIT: I noticed there were two PrintFab drivers for the P700: Epson SureColor SC-P700 and Epson SureColor SC-P700_RIP. I could not find any explanation of the difference, but I wondered if it had the RIP functionality that would allow me to adjust the UCR slider. I downloaded and installed the SC-P700_RIP driver. I didn't notice any differences, and I still can't adjust the UCR slider.

[zedonet]

Hello and please excuse the very late answer.

There are two drivers for the Epson SureColor SC-P700 printer:

1) The regular driver (without the ending "RIP") uses the newer ESC/P-R command language that sends the page as an RGB bitmap. Ink control and dithering is performed by the printer, so the print quality is very close to Epson's Windows driver.

This driver is better for black&white printing because it offers the original Epson "Advanced Black&White" mode (set "Mode"="Gray Photo" on tab "Color" to enable Advanced B&W).

Also this driver must be used when importing original Epson ICC profiles. In this case, prints will have the same colors as when printed with the Epson Windows driver configured to "Mode"="ICM" (instead of "Epson Standard (sRGB)").

2) The "RIP" driver is recommended for special applications like Screen Printing or DyeSub / DTF. It uses the older Epson ESC/P2 command language to control the printer hardware directly for direct access to all 10 inks and to achieve a higher rendering resolution.

This driver might be suitable for your purpose, the sliders "Black Level (UCR)" and "Bright inks Usage" sliders are available:

Epson SC-P700 RIP driver.png (21.18 KiB) Viewed 3635 times

If you move "Black Level" to max, grey will be printed only with black ink.