B&W Prints

[Smile]

Mikling,

When you produce your profile: are you actually printing a colour target with black/grey inks only ? I want to optimise my B/W printing on my Epson Pro 3800 for the Image Specialists inks. From what I can conclude from the help file I should print the 225 patch high quality target with advanced B/W enabled in the printer driver: is this the right way to do ?
And how to print advanced B/W using this customised "true B/W" custom profile ?

Perhaps I can assist you

To make BW profiles you need to use color patch target, I use 1440 patches for Hi-Gamut 6-8 ink machines. Because you need smooth gradations you can or should make even more patches. It depends on printer and media combo. And how picky you are. Sure you need to evaluate you results using not only prints but synthetic 3D gamut plots etc.

You should print your target in color and then using profile making software make specific BW profile from gathered data. You could print test chart in BW mode and then try to do the same but at least on Canon printing in BW makes more color cast that profile corrects afterward than printing in color then switching the profile to BW.

Once you select specific setting in printer driver and or printing software you can't change them. IF you do your profile becomes inacurate. Even printer driver update can screw things up.

Some printers require linearization to print correctly (meaning you print one special chart measure it build profile and using this profile print real target that once read will be used for your real profile) some don't. And you can't do any of this using basic packages.

 

[pharmacist]

Smile,

thanks for your input. However: I want to optimise the advanced B/W printing capabilities on my Epson Pro 3800. Something tells me your approach forces me to use the colour inks instead of the dedicated black, grey and light grey cartridges. So can I optimise advanced B/W printing printing a B/W version of the colour target and use the information to optimise the shadows and highlights in true B/W printing. If I force the printer only to use the B/W inks, no colour inks are used in neutral settings.

So using only black/grey inks, NO colour inks and to use the results to optimise advanced B/W printing.

 

[mikling]

I haven't started to do the details but Pharmacist, if you use the advanced B&W setting on your 3800 you cannot use a standard approach. Check Datacolors recommendation, I recall they have something on this. I think Smile's approach is using color inks to generate the grays and is not pertinent to what we are trying to achieve.


I am using four shades of black/ grey directly and not using any color at all. This means that I cannot create warm or cool tones of gray but am fixed at what the gray inks give me. Which is totally neutral in all light conditions. Smile's approach tries to get the accuracy of color measurement as perfect as possible by using as many sample as can be generated. However, depending on the light spectrum and angle, the dots of color and their spacings will interact with the light wavelengths to create certain casts in certain shades of gray. Thus you can generate a perfect gray for a certain light and only that condition. I've been down that road. The results are quite good actually but the critical eye will pick up slight irregularities in the gray in certain conditions.

My experiment as recommended by Datacolor, is to use a profile with the extended greys. This weekend will tell the story.

Needless to say, my next step is to use 6 shades of black/grey pigment suitable for the Claria based Epson machines. These printers produce no grain at all with the highest settings and would be pertinent for the A4 R260 all the way up to the 13x19 R1400. Might these produce better B&W than the 3800? Maybe maybe not. Only when we try will we find out.

 

[Smile]

If you use Quad Tone Rip and BW inks then you should be able to make perfect black and white prints.

It's a shame inks are for EPSON printers only and could have potential problems on Canon thermal print heads. I would adwise however to still use color print targets with many patches. AFAIK "extended grays" are more a marketing policy not a feature. I mean if Datacolor has some optimized target for BW printing with more gray patches than normal it could increase the profile quality only becaue their software algorithms is optimized to do so, but in general target colors are patented and if you have a target like standard TC9.18 with 918 patches this target gives you certain degree of printer profile quality. However if you import it back into ProfileMaker and increase patch number ten times it's more likely you would waste paper and time not make better profile. Except if your printer is not linearized - in other words does print shades in equal steps.

Also consider that the more patches you measure the more accurate your profile becomes and gamut size decreases.

So to make good BW profiles you need to linearize your printer (this is what usually RIP is for). If you try to linearize printer with BW inks instead of normal CMY inks I don't know what would happen. The printer driver is linearized in the factory to manufacturer OEM inks and it could make prints not acceptable. RIP bypasses the printer driver and avoids this problem.

I was thinking to outsource some HP gray ink and use it on a ip3000 with BCI-6 cartridges. But the BW profile is so good I not need to take extra hassle. Besides the ink needs to be a BW version of Yellow shade, BW version of Blue shade, BW version of Magenta shade. You can’t use same neutral Gray ink from HP to fill all 3 carts.

So if someone knows compatible Canon Gray ink I would attempt to try this too.

Also I almost forgot that major part in BW printing is played by media not ink. If you have very hi quality paper like profiling paper from HP with zero brighteners then even with color ink your prints will be neutral black and white.

However it’s different story with most normal hi quality papers like Canon photo paper pro etc. Because these papers contain brighteners and they depending on light spectrum change color. Depending on viewing conditions even BW print would have blue cast or red cast etc.

I do provide paper UV brightener testing services so for example:

as you can see from graph Canon paper does have brighteners that will impact viewing experience whatever ink combo you print with on it. You would be amazed how many quality papers are crap, and how many china made papers a good because they contain brighteners as much as brand name papers. Sure they are not suitable for BW printing. Only expensive brand name paper is good for BW and since brighteners can't fail over time I doubt it would have any problems.

 

[mikling]

My initial pass at my attempt is that it can work and does work. How well? I don't know yet. But Spyder3 print took a long while to create the profile. I am talking minutes here. Normally it completes it in less than a second. How and what was going on to take that long. I simply don't know. I actually thought the PC had hung but it hadn't. When I finally softproofed it, it looked OK. Now reading Datacolor's documentation it says that what I was doing was doable as they had told me. On the surface it initially had seemed like a wild idea, but when confirmation that it could be done, I jumped.

So here's what is up next. This B&W thing with digital is a whole can of worms as I am finding out. Images that look fine in color sometimes do not convert to B&W well. It was strange but now I'm finding out that monochrome is multichallenging. Hats off to those guys who really do B&W well. This has taken me to doing some research and starting to read some articles in Northlight Images on B&W which actually told me what I was finding out. Apparently the RAW conversion itself will affect the conversion to B&W. So what I am hearing is that sometimes similar images converted from RAW with different approaches will yield very different B&W images when the conversion to B&W takes place.

This is getting to be a headache now.

Smile I am using 3 levels of dyebased comptible HP gray ink that works on the Canon heads perfectly well. So you could try that with the iP3000.

So if we had Dark Grey, Medium Grey and Light Grey, what parallel assigment would you suggest? I'm also using Photoblack for Photoblack on the iP4200.

Dark Gray - Magenta
Medium Gray - Cyan
Light Gray - Yellow

I'm wondering if my assignment of Magenta and Cyan is sensible or is it the other way round?

 

[mikling]

OK, did the switch where CYAN is carrying the darkest gray.

It now looks darn good with the standard driver without any external color management.

I'll still proceed with the profile as Datacolor recommended and compare the two. As it is now, I'm very happy with the output. Hope it gets better.

 

[mikling]

YES. The prints look great.

My experiment is now finished. The initial inkset I used is so well balanced to as to having a BW version of Cyan, BW version of Magenta and B&W version of Yellow that profiling yielded essentially no better results. I had suspected this to a point. I also believe that this inkset would yield even better results on the BCI-6 series of printers but not markedly so.

I was never a B&W film photographer. However, converting my current photos to B&W and printing them is so nostalgic and the B&W provides a certain old heirloom look to the photos. I can certainly see why this B&W printing thing is "cool" in certain ways. It's just like my younger nephew who is now into listening to vinyl.

My conclusion is that neutral B&W printing on the iP series of printers and related multifunctions can easily be implemented by installing a grey inkset. The inkset I used can utilize the standard driver so no special rips or profiles are required. This convenience will allow even novice users to output very nice B&W photos with no cyan or magenta cast as is so often the case when using color inks.

Initially an idea off the top. I will keep these cartridges handy so whenever I want some B&W photos, I just pop them in, do a cleaning, a purge pattern to verify color fidelity and then I can start printing nice B&W photos.

 

[pharmacist]

Mikling,

your black/grey inkset: is it pigment based or dye ? Have you tried to use Canon Lucia based pigment ink, as these inks are optimised for thermal printheads like Canon and HP ?

 

[mikling]

The inkset is dye based.

The problem with Lucia or compatible is finding the cartridge that will guarantee optimal flow conditions long term. We know if this is not maintained, the thermal heads will become very disposable.

 

[Smile]

Smile I am using 3 levels of dyebased comptible HP gray ink that works on the Canon heads perfectly well. So you could try that with the iP3000.

Do you mind sharing HP cartridge numbers that you used to "donate" ink?

So if we had Dark Grey, Medium Grey and Light Grey, what parallel assigment would you suggest? I'm also using Photoblack for Photoblack on the iP4200.

Dark Gray - Magenta
Medium Gray - Cyan
Light Gray - Yellow

I'm wondering if my assignment of Magenta and Cyan is sensible or is it the other way round?

This can be resolved by checking density with densitometer or spectrophotometer that can measure density. Bu yes I think the dark gray would be blue, then magenta and yellow. I use "ColorShop X" for this.