Best Settings for black-and-white prints?

[Manuchau]

I have been asked by a professional photographer to produce a series of black-and-white brochures for her on semi-gloss paper. After printing some out with my Canon ipPixma 3000 on different papers, she is claiming that the solid blacks do not look as good OR as black as her photos. To my eye, they look great...but not to hers.

Does anyone know which Canon driver settings I can use to get the purest, deeepest blacks....or should I just have her print these at a professional studio on a laser printer?

As a final note, I also have just purchased a i9900 but don't have room to set it up just yet. Since that printer uses 2 blacks (BCI-3 and BCI-6), would the i9900 give me a richer black?

In any case, any advice on B&W settings would be helpful

Thanks

 

[Grandad35]

Manuchau,

Have you looked at the color values assigned to the "blacks" in the images that you printed? It is recommended practice in Photoshop to keep your blacks and whites at least 4-5% away from pure black and white, since many printing devices give strange effects if they are print "too close to the edge". Her images may not call for pure black. It is not uncommon for a good print shop to optimize images by adjusting the brightness/contrast/color saturation to improve the appearance. You didn't mention whites, but remember that even with no ink you are limited by the whiteness of the paper

This link gives an image that I use to check the B&W calibration of a display or printer: (http://www.nifty-stuff.com/img/files/B_WMonitorCal.jpg). The center is "pure" black (R=G=B=0), and the values increase in 5% increments for each box. If you can't see the difference between 0 and 5% or 95 and 100%, your monitor isn't calibrated correctly. Print this image to see if the center is darker than the photos printed for your client. If the 0 and 5% print at the same darkness, you may be limited by the inks, the printer, the profile, or the "intensity" setting. If you are using color management, the blacks can also be affected by the "Rendering Intent" and whether "Black point compensation" is turned on. If you are printing through a program like "Windows Photo Printing Wizard" you don't have access to these settings. Try increasing the "Intensity" setting, but don't be surprised if the black turns to a cloudy gray if it is laid down too heavy.

Sorry to disappoint you, but the i9900 only uses one black ink (the others are C/M/Y/PC/PM/Red/Green). If you want to get close on the grays, you will almost certainly need a printer profile (maybe even a custom profile for your individual printer) unless you stick to OEM inks (and maybe papers). Getting good B&W isn't easy - this is why some printers have multiple gray and black inks. It all depends on how fussy your client is.

 

[kenban]

Part of the problem is the iP3000 printer only uses 3 cartridges when priting pictures. The black is a pigment black so it can not be mixed with the dye based colors and is only used when printing on plain paper. What the printer has to do to form black is mix the Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow which does not always produce the best results. I have both an iP3000 and a i960 and I find the biggest differance between the printers is in the blacks. You might want to try to find a spot to unpack the i9900 (even if its on top of the box on the floor (which is where my iP3000 is sitting for a few days) you should get better results with that then you will on the iP3000.

I am not sure if there is a Black and White mode for the iP3000 that uses the BCI-3eBK on photo paper but I do not believe there is. You might want to try setting the printer to plain paper mode and turn up the print quality to High or custom (if you set it to custom click set and move the slider as far right as it lets you). I tried this out myself and as long as I was not in borderless printing mode the print looked ok but the black blends together and you lose any detail you might have but it was a nice dark black.

 

[Nifty]

When I was at Fry's Electronics in Arizona I saw the photo book in front of an i860 left by one of the Canon reps. It had a bunch of photos in it and I started thumbing through them. I found two pictures that looked exactly the same at first. They were of a girl with black hair, a black dress and a black background. Holding them side by side I noticed one didn't have as rich blacks as the other. I flipped them over and one had "i560" printed on the back and the other had "i860". It may have been a marketing ploy and I couldn't verify the settings, etc. but the point of all this is that there is suppose to be a relatively big difference in the 3 CMY printers and the 4+ CMYK printers and how they print black. Before I got my i860 I had a i560 and was very impressed with the quality of the prints and believe 99.8% of the population would be and wouldn't tell the difference in 3 vs. 4 color printers unless the prints were literally side by side.

 

[Grandad35]

Kenban,

You are right about the lack of a dye based black ink being a problem with getting dark blacks - I didn't realize that this was the case with the ip3000.

The probem with printing a pigment based ink on glossy paper is that the gloss will be very different in the dark areas (gloss differential). This is why Epson pigment printers are recommended for matte paper, and why they added a cart with "gloss optimizer (GLOP)" in some of their newer pigment based printers to print on glossy paper.

When I had to print a lot of B&W photos on a HP 5550, I refilled the #56 pigment based black cart with a dye based black, and this gave acceptable results. Obviously, this would require some experimentation with the printer settings.

 

[Manuchau]

Thank you all for for the excellent, detailed responses. All are very much appreciated, and I guess I'm going to have to do some experimenting.I'll post my results here in a few days....maybe it will help someone else with the same problem.