Could Our Brilliant forum Members Help me with my BW Canon iPF Printing?

[gdi]

First - I have found many threads, bits and pieces related to how to get the best BW out of inkjet printers.  Keith Cooper's site of course has a lot of info over the last decade or more, and there are some threads here, but I am never quite sure of what I need to do to get my  B&W prints to match my display. Below I'll summarize my equipment and goals and state some of my assumptions and would appreciate your critique abd advice!

Equipment:
 

• BW Film Negatives from 35mm, 120, to 8x10
• Scanned on either a Nikon 9000 or Epson V50, depending on format
• Using Lightroom as a catalog and mostly Photoshop for editing
• Printing on a Canon Pro 4000 using Canon's Print Studio Pro (PSP) plug in for Photoshop
• Profiling Monitor and some printer paper with an i1 Pro 2 and Iprofiler software

Workflow/Issues

• I am adjusting my files to my taste in Photoshop and then using PSP plugin to print
• I let the printer manage color and choose Canon's b&w Photo rather than a profile.
• The prints are nicely toned with no perecptible color cast
• The print contrast and brightness do not match the display and appear more flat and dark

This is what I think I need to do to accomplish matching the print to monitor  - please correct me where I have erred!

Create a B&W profile by printing the QTR 21 or 51 step chart via PSP in Photoshop with the printer managing color and set to BW.  Then I measure it with iProfiler and saving the results as a CGATS File with LAB values and drop this onto the QTR-Create_ICC_RGB applet to generate an ICC profile.

QUESTION - Here I think I may be missing a step - does QTR automatically know what reference chart I selected and used in order to compare the i1 measurements to the reference values?  Or do I need to tell it, and if so, how?

Now once I have the ICC Profile, I am confused as to whether I use that only on softproofing to adjust my monitor and then print in PSP using the Canon B&W driver, or do I use it for softproofing and also use that profile for printing with PSP? I assume I can adjust by soft proofing (turn on BPC and Simulate Paper Color?) and then print (either with the BW default or the new QTR Profile in PSP and I should get a closer match.

Finally, do I need to convert the image I am printing to gamma 2.2 when first opening it? Or will this make a difference?

THanks in advance - and please let me know if more info is needed.

[louismccullagh]

I feel your pain. I just bought the imageprint software to solve those problems. Up to now I used labs and they didnt always manage to produce great B/W but printing from photoshop drove me crazy, I obviously did not know what I was doing plus even if I had I wouldnt have got the best results.
I presume you colour profile your monitor with a device. (some monitors even profiled will not be close to perfect).
Imageprint totally controls my printer. I select the paper and whether it is a colour or B/W print and imageprint loads a perfect profile for that paper and my exact printer. The software shows a softproof of the image. I hit print and great result.
Note MATTE paper looks flatter and less contrasty than glossy paper, you can make changes to try to bridge the gap in how the 2 types of paper look.

[gdi]

Thank you Lewis! 

I feel I am so close but just need a little help in figuring out all the various bits and pieces of information information available over the years.

BTW,  I am profiling my BenQ SW series monitor with a i1 Pro 2 and iProfiler. 

I have not looked at Imageprint, but I will now.  I can see it supports my printer - Canon Pro 4000, so that’s good!

[Paul_Roark]

My crude solution to matching my monitor to the B&W print output is to put a curves layer over the file just before printing and pull the white end point down to 60%.  It "dulls" the image.  The monitor (which is excellent for most uses) is so much brighter than a reflective print, that this seems to help.  I adjust the brightness of the image under the layer to look good on the monitor, and find that the resulting print (with layer removed) looks very close to what I saw on the monitor.  It's simple and it works.

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com

[gdi]

Thanks Paul, that definitely sounds simple enough - even for me! I’ll give it a try.

[Jonathan Cross]

I have a Canon Pro-300 printer and use Canon's Print and Layout plug-in for LR and PS.  From Canon's website it appears to be compatible with the 4000 printer.  In this plug-in, if you specify a black and white image then it does not use an icc profile.  You just specify the media of your paper (this should be available for your printer from your paper supplier).

I find this gives excellent results on my fine art non-Canon paper.

This is, of course, separate from profiling your monitor.

Jonathan

[gdi]

Thanks!  I have not tried the Layout plugin, I’ll try it out to see if it can help with matching.

I have a Canon Pro-300 printer and use Canon's Print and Layout plug-in for LR and PS.  From Canon's website it appears to be compatible with the 4000 printer.  In this plug-in, if you specify a black and white image then it does not use an icc profile.  You just specify the media of your paper (this should be available for your printer from your paper supplier).

I find this gives excellent results on my fine art non-Canon paper.

This is, of course, separate from profiling your monitor.

Jonathan

[widmark]

I'm a bit confused by the process outlined in the initial post. I thought Quad Tone RIP doesn't support Canon? Are you just using the QTR-Create_ICC tool to make an ICC profile and then use it with Canon PP&L?

I was experimenting with black and white printing and also tried using Dinax Mirage, which has a grayscale mode, using Printfactory which is my main means of printing, and also using QTR's Print Tool, a separate program to QTR, that does work with Canon. It has a black and white mode (using Epson nomenclature) that supports ICC profiles, whereas Mirage and PP&L don't use a profile when printing in grayscale/bw.

I was mostly doing this to try to avoid a bronzing issue I was seeing, which in the end had more to do with the type of ink and paper then how I was printing it, as all the above results were giving me a good neutral black and white print. In the end I think I was just using Printfactory with the normal color profile I made through it.

[Wheathin21]

I've experimented with several different b/w printing workflows and what I've found works best is simply using same workflow as color printing, but with no Saturation. If you're monitor well calibrated and set up for soft proofing and your printed is well linearized and profiled, it should work well, or at least it does for me on my ipf8400. Though I use displaycal and Argyllcms for monitor and printer profiling.

I think the reason this is bc the color space that the printer is using has a different gamma then your working space.

[jemadsen]

My B&W workflow for printing on my Canon imagePrograf 1000 is:
Desaturate a virtual copy of the image in question, and edit to my liking (in DxO Pholab Elite).
Use soft proofing with ICC profile for the paper to give an idea of the result (I'm not a big fan of SP).
When finished I export a TIFF in max resolution to QImage Ultimate printing software.
Print with QImage colour management with printer driver set to B&W and appropiate ICC profile, same as used in SP.
The result is (most often) a print to my liking, although as mentioned in the thread reflected images look (very) different from even the best calibrated monitor, and the difference varies with the surface of the paper just to complicate matters further.
To my own convenience I have set up print presets for each paper I use and for both colour and B&W.