b&W printing question

[raphael1985]

I have an Epson photo Stylus 830u (5 colors +black) and an epson t10 (3 colors+ black). and a photo paper. I would like to know the best settings when printing black and white fotos on either of the two.

should i set the printer to black ink only?

what settings do you use when using adobe photoshop?

what software do you use for printing?

is the epson photo stylus 830u better than epson stylus t10 when printing b&W? I'm assuming it is because it is a photo stylus.


and a noob idiot question. how do i thank anyone for the answer here?

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[KmH]

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[Garbz]

Don't try to score free brownie points for thanks for that post KmH

I'm not sure of the specifics of your printer, but do either have 2 black cartridges? One for photo black and one for normal black? Setting the print driver to black and white would in most cases cause the wrong cartridge to be used. I did this on my Canon pixma and the resulting photo came out green. Thus I would say print in colour and let the printer sort out the issues.

In the case of Photoshop / Lightroom you have the option to manually colour manage the document before printing. Thus you should disable the colour management in the print driver. This is the *best* option. The other option is to just print and let the print driver take care of this. Truthfully I know someone who owns a little gallery who does this and his prints still look perfectly stunning.

* Best only if you know every detail about how it works, rendering intents, have profiles for various papers and your printer or create your own profiles, that sort of thing. Otherwise it's likely just to cause more pain.


Realistically you own both these printers right? Load em up with paper and have a test run with a few different settings.

[raphael1985]

Mr Garbz,

yes i do own both the epson stylus photo 830u and epson stylus T10.

my epson stylus Photo 830u is now under repair, but i have printed black and white with it before, it wastes a lot of ink (including all other colours) in colour mode even when printing black and white only. might have something to do with the setting.

as for the Epson T10, i think i'll wait for the CISS because i use it for printing delivery slips. can't afford to waste the ink.

what do you mean disable printer color management? there are a lot of choices when in print preview of photoshop. or do you mean that i set it to output?

as for my own question, i have found a pdf that is about monochrome black only printing - http://www.njphotoforum.com/whitepapers/blakonly.pdf just in case someone else is interested.

[Garbz]

The colour management issue is a case of software vs system driver. At some point when you hit print your colour space must change from your working colour space (sRGB usually but increasingly AdobeRGB) to the printer colour space (when I print on photo paper plus glossy in my case it's Canon iP4200 SP2).

Now this is done in one of two ways. The most common way is that the software (photoshop) passes the sRGB image to the printer driver and that then converts it to the profile based on paper and quality settings.
The other way is to set photoshop to convert the colours directly to the profile the printer is going to ink with, and then go into the printer settings, find the colour tab, and look for some advanced option that completely disables colour management. This would normally result in very weird colours but since photoshop takes the printer into account it all works out happily.

Now I have no idea if this changes / improves / even works at all when printing black and white. It is just something to add to the list of things that you could possibly experiment with.