Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

I print about 20 contest-winning photographs a month for the photographers who took the photos, to display at 2'x3' in an outdoor public non-profit gallery (at a local church).  Most of the photographers have never seen their works this large. 
I do *everything* through Qimage.      The photographers love the results!

About 40% of the photographs are monochrome or black and white.   I am wondering if there are some Qimage settings that I should look into in order to do a better job with these photos.   

(I print on an Epson SC-P7570 24" printer, onto Canon Polypropylene Matt paper that has been custom-profiled for my printer.   I use this paper because it is the best I have found for quality photographs that are hanging outdoors unprotected from the weather.)

I don't do a lot of B&W prints but I know there are members here who do.  What sort of ideas are you looking for?  More on the editing side or printer settings to print the best B&W?  Maybe others can chime in.

Regards,
Mike

More on settings (in Qimage, and in the printer), than editing.

Since my specific use case is printing photos for other serious amateur photographers, I wouldn't edit their photos normally.
But I am responsible for getting the best printed results possible!

John

Qimage will ensure you have the maximum detail being sent to the printer so most of your print variables will be in the driver itself.  Since you have a custom profile for the paper you are using, you should get good black and white prints using that profile just by printing the same way you would a color print.  Have you compared printing that way versus printing using the advanced black and white mode of the driver?  I'd be tempted to print some test strips printing in color mode using your custom profile compared to printing via the advanced black and white mode in the driver (with Qimage's printer profile set to "let printer/driver manage color").  See how they compare.

Regards,
Mike

I did the experiment, though not in the best possible way.

The challenge I found in printing using Advanced B&W through Qimage (note:  I am running Windows 7 in VMware, so this may be an artifact...) is that the default for Advanced B&W in the driver for "Color Toning" is NOT "Neutral", but "Darker".   And whenever I reset the default in the Qimage printer settings popup, it didn't 'stick'.  So I suspect that when I actually went to print from Qimage it printed "Darker".

But even so, using a real and very good (200+dpi) b&w photo, I could see no difference between what Qimage produced with a printer profile for my paper, and using "Advanced B&W Color" plus "Let printer driver manage color".   (I didn't use a test strip.)

Seeing all the options under Advanced B&W Color in the driver made me wonder whether that set of tools/settings were created back in the days when B&W images were scanned from b&w film and before photographers got good at adjustments in image printing tools.    I have no idea, but the adjustments allow for a lot of changes, but pretty subtle ones.   Head scratcher, at least for me.

Thanks for suggesting the experiment, Mike.

You should be able to print using "neutral" from Qimage.  Qimage's AI Copilot might be interfering.  You can turn off all the options for driver AI by clicking the AI Copilot (robot button) on top of the main UI and then unchecking all the boxes under driver AI so you have full control.

Regards,
Mike

I'll sometimes do a slight sepia or other tint to photos, but if I don't want that, my Canon has several grey inks. I think the driver can be set to use those inks only, for monochrome prints, which should eliminate color casts. Don't know about the Epson but it might be similar. As for Qimage, I just let it do its thing, which it does very well.