Problem with adjusting for warmer tones

[Pietrach]

Hi

I have a problem with representation of colours in print.

I recently tested two labs, DS Colour Labs and Loxley Colour, to see which I prefer. I am happy with the quality of prints from both, and the service is amazing, especially the speed at DSC. However, the prints from DSC come out with a very subtle hue of sepia in them. The first batch I sent was without using their icc profiles, so I thought fair enough. So now I enabled both Loxley and DSC paper/printer profiles, and indeed there is a difference. On the same paper (Fuji lustre) the Loxley profiles show the image almost identical to my original jpeg. But the DSC profile shows a very slight hue of sepia (warmer tones). This is especially visible on black and white images. Loxley's images are "truer" black and white, with white being white. Whereas the DSC is warmer.

I tried to correct this but I was not successful. Tried playing with colour balance, saturation, setting a white point, adjusting colour balance to introduce a bit of blue (take out yellow). All these did help marginally, but when viewed sided by side with either the original jpeg or Loxley profile, the warmer tones are evident.


Any advice how an image can be adjusted to remove these warmer tones?

My line of thought was that I essentially want to turn sepia into a b&w image.


Thanks

 

[KernowChris]

Don't know if this helps, but I had a similar question recently with some black and white prints that showed an odd hue under some lighting but not others. See if the effect changes for different light sources first.

 

[Harlequin565]

It ends up being a bit of a fiddle. Some papers naturally have a hue to them. When I ran some test prints with some Epson papers, this was the result. Colour profiled properly - same printer, same image.

You can see here that the caste is quite pronounced (these are all the same test image) and this is almost certainly down to a combination of how the paper reacts to the ink, and the icc profile. I'm assuming that Loxley & DSCL are using different papers (as well as different printers which would mean different icc profiles) so you're going to get different results. My suggestion would be to go with the printer that's delivering the best results for you.

The problem with tweaking your B&W post processing to "fix" paper/icc differences is that you have to end up introducing a very subtle colour tone to offset whatever the printer is doing and that can take a lot of prints (and time/money ordering, waiting, re-ordering etc) to get right. There's no magic bullet I'm afraid - although if you have Lightroom, you could try soft proofing to see if that introduces the caste - which is then relatively easy to fix.

Good luck!