  X-ray emission spectroscopy is a well-established technique used to study
continuum lowering in dense plasmas. It relies on accurate atomic physics
models to robustly reproduce high-resolution emission spectra, and depends on
our ability to identify spectroscopic signatures such as emission lines or
ionization edges of individual charge states within the plasma. Here we
describe a method that forgoes these requirements, enabling the validation of
different continuum lowering models based solely on the total intensity of
plasma emission in systems driven by narrow-bandwidth x-ray pulses across a
range of wavelengths. The method is tested on published Al spectroscopy data
and applied to the new case of solid-density partially-ionized Fe plasmas,
where extracting ionization edges directly is precluded by the significant
overlap of emission from a wide range of charge states.
