Do I need to print Black & White?

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Rayguitar

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Ray Girling
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Hi,
could any one give me some advice on black & white printing,i have my prints lab printed at the moment, black and white prints always come back with a colour cast on them. We had a print folio at the camera club in the week, these all looked good quality with no casts.
Do most people print mono at home or is lab printing an option?
I am thinking of buying an Epson R2880 to do just Black and White what do members think?

thanks in advance

Ray
 
Rayguitar said:
Hi,
could any one give me some advice on black & white printing,i have my prints lab printed at the moment, black and white prints always come back with a colour cast on them. We had a print folio at the camera club in the week, these all looked good quality with no casts.
Do most people print mono at home or is lab printing an option?
I am thinking of buying an Epson R2880 to do just Black and White what do members think?

thanks in advance

Ray
Click to expand...

Just a consideration but it maybe your monitor needs profiling...i.e you are seeing BW on the screen but actually it's not what the image is actually like when the lab receives and prints it.
Also try talking to the lab and asking their opinion on the subject. If in doubt get an image from a friend at the camera club that was printed that you have seen is ok (no colour cast on print) and ask the lab to print it. See what it looks like on your monitor as well.

It's alot of money to spend on a printer and all the ink cartridges for just BW images when it could just be something simple.
I'm no expert on the subject but hope it helps you in some way.

Neil.
 
I found it took a bit of tweaking with levels and contrast etc for my canon pixma, but once I had spent the time doing some test prints and noting the settings I used it was easy to get reasonably good B&W's.
One of the keys I found was using good quality paper matched to the printer (Canon pro paper in my case) and original cartridges.
 
I use on-line printing, and when I apply the printers profile, this does give my B&W image's a slight warm colour cast, so A quick levels adjustment seems to rectify this and my images come back perfect B&W.
 
I tell my lab it's a black & white in the file name, never get problems. A good lab will check for quality and even call you to see if you intended a colour cast. When you say pro lab do you mean pro or cheap online?
 
Al Brum said:
I tell my lab it's a black & white in the file name, never get problems. A good lab will check for quality and even call you to see if you intended a colour cast. When you say pro lab do you mean pro or cheap online?
Click to expand...
Hi its not a pro Lab just DS Colour labs std service
 
I would try a different lab.
 
If you tell the lab it's a b&w, they should print it like that. If they see a cast, the assumption is likely to be that this was intended. I've heard the other side of the story, where people have sent stuff with an intended slight tone effect and got it back as a full mono!

Also, how are you rendering the file? Are you using a `discard colour information` command, or just desaturating? If you do the conversion and then in `mode` select `convert to greyscale`, you'll see a prompt asking if this is what you want to do (this is in Photoshop). That may fix it.
 
I always use DSCL for my digital prints and I have had a lot of b&w from them and I have never noticed a colour cast in any of them. I think that it may be a monitor calibration problem.

Andy
 
Rayguitar said:
Hi its not a pro Lab just DS Colour labs std service
Click to expand...

Are you selecting pre corrected or not? If selecting pre corrected dscl won't correct anything.

I'd suggest calibrating your displays, otherwise prints can vary hugely to what you see.
 
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