Test sheet: Find your tone (Advanced)
Is there a better tone than any of the ones we offer?
Is there a better tone than any of the ones we offer?
The question: the Basic sheet compares the tones you can pick. This one asks whether something better than any of them exists for your process — by walking right around the colour wheel.
Where: Tonal Scale ▸ Compare tonal scales…, with Advanced selected.
Finding a colour is done in two steps, because one sheet can't do both jobs well. A wheel-sized question needs columns that look obviously different from each other; a within-a-hue question needs near neighbours. Offering the near neighbours first would only invite agonising over differences your process can't hold.
Twelve columns spanning the hue circle, plus the same two reference columns as the Basic sheet: Black, and Now (whatever you currently print with). Print it, contact print it, and find the neighbourhood that works — not the exact colour, just the region.
Back in the dialog, use "take a closer look around…" and choose the column that won. That prints a second sheet exploring the hues around it.
The two passes tile: the outermost columns of the closer look land exactly on the coarse winner's two neighbours, so nothing between them goes unexamined.
A finer hue step would be false precision. The difference it describes sits inside the run-to-run noise of hand-coating, humidity, the sun and the paper batch — so offering it would invite you to agonise over a distinction the process cannot actually hold.
Coarse sheet gives you a neighbourhood. The closer look gives you a colour inside it. That's as fine as the process supports.
Each column is labelled with an address like 4c or
11a, and that label is the same string everywhere: on the printed
sheet, in the "take a closer look" list, in the "use this colour" control, and
in the tone picker itself. There are 48 of them.
So when a column wins, you can go and select it. A test sheet whose winner couldn't be picked would be a dead end, and that's why the reference columns behave differently: Now is a reference, and nothing refines around it. Sweeping around your current tone would produce colours sitting off the grid — unnameable, unpickable, and useless as an answer.
Because visible colour doesn't predict behaviour in the exposing band. A tone that looks weak on screen can block UV better than one that looks convincingly dark. SaltPrint asks the printer for a colour and the driver decides what to lay down; nothing in that chain is inspectable by eye.
Read the columns the same way as on the Basic sheet: the winner is the one with the most evenly separated steps across the full range, not the one with the whitest top patch.
Rubylith, from the Basic sheet, is a muted red — it sits inside the colour wheel rather than on its fully-saturated rim, so no probe on this sheet reproduces it. That's why both sheets exist and why neither replaces the other. If rubylith is what you use, compare it on the Basic sheet.
All four work the same way, and none of them can be judged on screen:
The blank bottom row is clear film. No ink at all. It exposes fully and prints your darkest tone, so it's the reference every column above it is read against.
Column headings are printed in clear, on a darkened band. Clear is the only "ink" guaranteed to print dark, so the labels stay readable on the finished print rather than disappearing.
Judge it dry, not wet.
Select the winning shade by its address from the tone picker, or straight from the sheet's "use this colour" control. Then measure a correction curve against it — colour first, curve second.