Editing a printer profile - looking for more satured black on Canson Rag Photo..

[jack777]

For some time I've been printing on Canson Rag Photographique paper and have been very happy with the generic profile. However now I've got some black&white photos and they just don't look good enough. On the generic profile dark black seem to have green cast and greys look a bit red. So I've created a custom profile with a profile maker. And well... it is better but I think epson 9900 can do better than that on this paper. Color cast on greys is gone but I the black... still seem a bit undersatured. Basically my question boils down to - how can I move black point inside ICC profile and will it help (at least in theory:)
There was a very good article on LL about increasing color density in the driver and than creating a profile but first I would like to see if I can do better without changing paper settings.

[Alan Goldhammer]

Have you tried printing the B/W images using the Epson ABW driver?  It gives you a higher Dmax and uses less colored ink than printing through the conventional driver.

[KeithR]

Printing B&W through the color setting(as opposed to ABW or something like QTR) uses all the inks. The Epson inks use magenta to help get a neutral BLK, but it ends up giving it a green cast and your grays end up with a slight red(magenta)hue. As Alan has pointed out, using the ABW inside the printer driver doesn't use as much of the color inks to get neutrality, and relies more on the use of the the 3 BLKS. Another useful program is the QuadTone Rip(QTR).

[jack777]

Thank you I will try that. Do I need to create a new profile for ABW (for example "neutral") or does it color manage and I need to turn profiles off?

[Alan Goldhammer]

Thank you I will try that. Do I need to create a new profile for ABW (for example "neutral") or does it color manage and I need to turn profiles off?

You can use an ABW profile which linearizes the gray scale only if you are printing on a Windows machine.  If you are using MacOS, it won't allow you to go this route; you need to use "printer manages color".  There was a thread a week or so ago on this topic and you might look that up.