Hi,
I have been using Qimage Ultimate for several years now.
My old pc died, and so I started building it from scratch.
Everything in Qimage works as always, but one thing is weird.
I created a template with a black background. (hue=160, rest is 0) It always printed pitch black.
Now on my new windows 10 machine (on the same printer, with the same ICC), it prints a dirty faded gray as background.
When I select bright red, it comes out bright red.
Its just the black that is faded to a dirty gray.
The black in images print pitch black, its only the page background that fades.

What can I do to fix this?

Thank you for your quick reply.
The button you are referring to is the one I use.
On screen it looks perfect black. Hue fixed to 160, RGB=0
Only when I print the black page background, it comes out faded gray.

See attached photo
As you can see, it has perfect blacks in the image but not the background.

Try this experiment please.
Try a Print to FILE. See how the black page looks there.
If looks good, then the data sent to Printer is good.
Thumb of Print to File and snap of print to file image in queue.
Fred

I don't think Fred meant that print to file would to be a work around. It's a way of checking if the background data output from QU is correct.
Terry

My sincere apologies if my reply sounded like a rant. It is certainly not meant that way.
BTW, i printed to TIFF and the black background was pitch black.

I am curious why it only happens with the black background.
And it only happens in QU  . (Which I always use for printing simply because it is the best)

Other colours are correctly printed on my postscript printer.
That is why I think something in the black definition is incorrect.

I am not a colour expert, but might it be hue or perhaps saturation?
The default black background setting is Hue=160, Sat=0, Lum=0, R-0, G=0, B=0.
Could a setting be negative (-0) which causes wrong interpretation in my printer?

When I change hue, nothing changes in the print.
Also when I change printer ICC (even when turning it off), the background is not black.
(just thinking out loud)

This proves that Qimage is sending RGB 0,0,0 to the driver.  After that, it's down to the driver as to where the problem is occurring.  Why would black in your prints come out black and the page background turns out gray?  It comes down to how the driver handles print commands.  When Qimage prints the page background color, it sends a command to the printer that tells it to print a black rectangle covering the entire printable area.  It does this by specifying the upper left corner of the rectangle, lower right corner, and RGB 0,0,0.  The driver is then supposed to fill that rectangle with the color black.  This is different than when you print a black image: in that case, Qimage sends the actual pixels inside the rectangle rather than just telling the driver "create a black rectangle".

My guess is your driver has a bug where it isn't rendering black properly if it is asked to print a black rectangle just by specifying its coordinates and the black 0,0,0 color.  A workaround would be to create a small all-black image: say a 1000x1000 pixel image with all RGB 0,0,0.  Then instead of selecting a black page background, add that all-black image to the page using "fit to page" sizing with crop turned on so the black print fills the page.  Then add your other prints on top of that black image using freehand placement mode.  If it works, you could create a layout that has the all-black image covering the page and some templates on top where you can drag images.  It's a workaround but probably the best I can do since I can't fix bugs in drivers.

Regards,
Mike

Also...I tried to find a way to create a 2 layered template but cannot find it.
Could you please give me some hints ho to do this?

This is what Mike is directing you to do

NO TEMPLATE NEEDED
Fred