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The calibration page I use is available for you to download free and use as you wish, so long as you don’t sell it or distribute it without the name and copyright information shown on it. If you want to offer it for free from your own web-site or in any other way, email me (link above) and I will usually be happy to agree.
Download the page by right clicking on the thumbnail at left and choosing Save Target As, then selecting a destination for the file. The file is saved as an LZW compressed Tiff and uses the Adobe RGB (1998) colour space.
Once you’ve downloaded and printed a copy, look at the black column and identify the point at which you can no longer visually distinguish between adjacent blocks of increasing darkness. (These are shown in 2% as well as 1% steps, in case it is hard to tell the smaller steps apart.) This is the darkest shade that that particular printer/ink/paper combination can reproduce. If you then adjust the image file you are printing so that everything fits within that range, the shadows will no longer block up on your print, and will have the full range of detail that is on your original. For example, if you can distinguish 94% from 95% black, but 95, 96, 97, etc. All look the same, then 95% is the darkest shade you can reproduce: changing the image file that you send to print so that its tones occupy the range 0 to 95% will then mean that when it is printed they will fill the range of 0 to 100% of what the print is capable of showing - no details lost, no potential range wasted.
If you are using Adobe PhotoShop, the easiest way to do this is to call up the Levels dialogue box and use the left hand box above the “Output Levels” bar to move up the black point. Remembering that since your printer works in CMYK with percentages of 1-100 and the monitor works in RGB with 255 steps, each percentage point you need to adjust represents 2.55 steps - so in the example above, to set a 95% shadow level, you would enter 12 or 13 in the box, since 5x2.55 = 12.75. You can save this adjustment as part of a PhotoShop Action to use whenever you use that paper/ink combination. (Remember to apply it before you use any unsharp mask.)
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