Printed photos different to Originals

[SniperDaws]

ok ive just bought a Canon MP 520 and im having a spot of trouble with photo printing.

Basically ive downloaded some nice black and white pics that id my girlfriend wants to frame and stick on the wall but when i print them out they look slightly sepia instead of black and white, even when i choose greyscale to print the photos.

This is driving me mad and ive already used a box of photo paper and my inks getting hammered aswell, please please can somone help i just want to be able to print out the photos as they were intended.

original pic is Jpeg 1488x2061
Canon mp 520 Driver v1.00
WinXP SP3

Original Pic
Pic after printing



Any help please

 

[OdiN]

Greyscale uses magenta as well as black ink. If your driver doesn't have a B&W option, you're probably out of luck.

Also - is your monitor calibrated? It may be printing correctly after all.

 

[SniperDaws]

Ive added the pics now if you want to see, its terrible compared to the original.

i havent seen an option for black and white only grayscale.

 

[OdiN]

Leave it in color mode (not greyscale) and print it.

 

[SniperDaws]

ive just done a small post card size and it looks purple, do you need special photo paper for black and white photos, ive just put my photo paper next to my normal every day paper and the photo paper looks like an off white compared to the normal A4 paper.

here look

Printed with colour option

 

[OdiN]

Well...I think they do make paper that works better for B&W but it shouldn't be that necessary.

I'm thinking you either have some old ink or your color profiles are not right. I can't tell what profile your source is here at work, but your printer will need to be able to match it and that might be part of the problem.

Also you may need to load a specific ICC color profile for your printer into the program doing the printing - which may not support that if you're using elements - I don't know.

http://www.drycreekphoto.com/tools/profile_converter/

That program will allow you to convert an image to a different color profile - you will need the ICC profile for your printer and convert your image to that, then it *should* print fine, unless there is an ink problem.

I'd try that rather than spending a lot of money on a new ink cartridge.

 

[angry hampster]

^ Agreed. Printing B&W photos is difficult to do properly from a digital file without the correct profile.

 

[QuixoticOne]

There are a few possible issues:

Metamerism -- this is a function of the ink and the paper and can produce an apparent color cast in the printout where there should be none due strictly to the way the ink and paper interact. A lot of times you have no practical choice of other inks in a given printer, and a limited choice of papers because the color profiling built into the printing software is only going to work well for certain predefined paper products that can be selected in the driver at print time. Usually changing the printing settings and possibly changing the paper are the only ways you can effectively ameliorate this problem, often with not totally satisfactory results. Sometimes the color shift due to metamerism is dependent on the illuminating light as well as the angle you look at the print.

The color profile mapping the source image to the printer output given the paper used is slightly off. Actually unless you're familiar with explicit color management and use tools like photoshop or qimage or something you may not know about color profiles or have any options to use them even if you wanted to. Basically there has to be a calibration that maps the color numbers that correspond to a pixel in the photo to the colors that can actually be seen on a given piece of paper with a given set of inks and a given printer and printer settings. Usually the brightness of the whites, the depth / blackness of the blacks, and the number of tones in between black and white will be unavoidably different between a printout and on the screen, no matter what printer you use. The brightness/whiteness of white for instance is determined by the paper color and brightness and the way the light illuminating it since no ink is involved in most cases in printing the white areas (some printers do have a 'gloss' ink that can be used but that's a special case).

Anyway the point is that the colors can almost never be exactly the same on screen and when printed, but color profile technology (if your printer driver even supports that -- many low end printer drivers don't) lets you map the colors according to three strategies --
absolute, relative, perceptual each with various benefits and disadvantages. If your tonal ranges are off and the thing looks like details are lost in the tone ranges, darks too uniformly dark instead of having more dark tones, same deal with lights, darks too light, whatever, then switching your rendering intent among the various strategies and perhaps even manually remapping the intensity / gamma curve can help bring out the details and maximize the perceived quality of the print.

White (and grey / black) balance -- this is basically an issue where the colors that should be strictly neutral (uncolored shades of grey anywhere from pure black to pure white) are not quite purely neutral and have instead some color cast. On the screen colors are made mixing Red, Green, Blue, and neutral colors are made by mixing equal amounts of those three so they cancel out (in theory) to a pure grey so if you look at the pixel color values:
Black = 0 Red, 0 Green, 0 Blue
White = 255 Red, 255 Green, 255 Blue (where 255 is the maximum possible value per color in this case)
Mid-Grey = 128 Red, 128 Green, 128 Blue
and so on anywhere where R = G = B is a grey.
If the original photo has some slight color cast to it (greys a little blue due to daylight or maybe a little red due to incandescent light or whatever) then this color cast can be amplified in printing to look even worse due to the effect of using color profiles and printers with a different color gamut than the screen has, what might not show up on screen shows up in the print, but the actual PROBLEM is at least partly with the original photo.

You CAN and SHOULD adjust the white balance of the original photo before printing it so that black / white / neutral colors are actually perfectly neutral. If you take a color photo and apply a B&W filter to it to make it B&W/greyscale then the actual resultant digital image on the PC *should* have been made into a pure neutral source image even if the original color photo had a color cast due to imperfect white balance or whatever. If you do a B&W conversion on a 'color' image and like the way the B&W looks on the screen then that is all you can do to the source image (without getting into 'artistic' distortions of the tonal curves) to make it neutral for printing.

If the printout of a known pure neutral image is STILL color casted to some tint then your problem would be either in the ink/paper (metamerism), or a bad color profile for the combination of ink + paper + printer settings, or bad viewing conditions (you didn't let it dry, you're looking at the print under an illumination that is not what the printing color profile is designed for and the VIEWING light is giving a color cast to the image e.g. sunlight vs. incandescent vs. fluorescent et. al.).

The best way to check your printer by eye is to print out a series of good test photos and try to find the stragegies of printing options and paper / ink choices that results in the best overall quality and fidelity of the colors and tones in the photos.

Typically a good test image will have a set of neutral steps ranging from black progressively through greys up to white. It'll typically also have some steps going through the various intensities of other ink colors and will have various color boxes as well to represent common colors like daylight, grass, skin tones, et. al.

You'd try to calibrate the printer settings to give good results on neutral ramp / test strip printouts and once that is done you should be able to print a neutral real source image as long as the printer options and color profiles for the printer/paper in use are kept the same as during your calibration.

You can also use color management software like ArgyllCMS in conjunction with a scanner or reflective colorimeter device to print out a known color calibration chart on your printer using specified settings, scan it in, automatically look at the color errors , and generate a new color profile that you can apply to your printing workflow given the appropriate software to help correct printing color errors for that ink/paper/settings combination.

Read this stuff and you'll understand how to identify and fix the problems to the extent possible with the equipment you use or can get.

http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/digitalblack.html
http://www.northlight-images.c...nd_white_printing.html
http://www.northlight-images.c...l_black_and_white.html

http://www.normankoren.com/makingfineprints.html
http://www.normankoren.com/makingfineprints1A.html
http://www.normankoren.com/printer_calibration.html
http://www.normankoren.com/color_management.html

http://www.digitaldog.net/file...nter_Test_file.jpg.zip
http://www.northlight-images.c...pages/test_images.html
http://www.northlight-images.c...le_1/bw_lin_test_1.zip

http://www.normankoren.com/mak...nts4.html#BW_testchart
http://www.normankoren.com/Stepchart_large_color2.jpg

http://www.colormanagement.org...nitortestbilder_v3.zip
http://www.northlight-images.c...le_1/matrixlarge_1.zip

http://www.northlight-images.c...ble_1/Test_Image_1.zip
Printer test file (Adobe 98 colour space - 600kB)

http://www.northlight-images.c...rontier_color57s_1.zip

http://www.northlight-images.c...ck_and_white_test.html
http://www.northlight-images.c...le_1/bw_lin_test_1.zip

http://legacycreative.gettyima..._Images_Test_Image.jpg
http://legacycreative.gettyima..._Images_Test_Image.tif

http://luminous-landscape.com/essays/test-charts.shtml
http://www.hutchcolor.com/Images_and_targets.html

http://www.isisimaging.com/PRODUCTS.html

http://www.northlight-images.c...oadable_1/DL_page.html

http://www.northlight-images.c...loadable_1/OJpix_1.zip

http://www.northlight-images.c...oadable_1/bwtest_1.zip

http://www.northlight-images.c...media_test_images.html

http://www.on-sight.com/downloads/

http://homepage.mac.com/billatkinson/FileSharing2.html
http://homepage.mac.com/WebObj...le%20Test%20Images.zip
http://homepage.mac.com/WebObj...-Eight%20Balls.tif.zip

http://www.outbackprint.com/pr...ights/pi049/essay.html

http://www.inkjetart.com/custom/
http://www.inkjetart.com/custom/4800test.zip
http://www.xmission.com/~inkje...o/tss_printer_test.zip
http://www.xmission.com/~inkjetcolo/JPEG.zip

http://www.andrewdarlow.com/calib.html

 

[SniperDaws]

Thankyou all for your help, im going to have a good read now, i will let you know how it goes

 

[corkyg]

H-P does have a grayscale ink cartridge. I use the CB264A cartridge for grayscale photos. But really, most of the time for grayscale I use my laser printer.

And there are others:

Grayscale

 

[SniperDaws]

i think its the paper that causing this, i did a print on my everyday paper ( not photo paper ) and the colours were correct, black was black and white was white like the original picture but obviously looked naff cos it wasnt photo quality paper, so my next question is, can you get WHITE photo paper instead of off white? i have some matt photo paper and that is also an off white and gives the same sepia results when trying to print B&W photos, i have also just wasted the 3 colour inks and my black is still 3/4's full


i have an idea if anyone is willing to try?

could somone copy and save the original Jpeg in my first post and print it using photo paper and photo quality and let me know how it comes out? or even scan it and post a link to it so i can compare?

 

[SniperDaws]

ok i printed the photo on my nextdoors printer and it came out perfect and looked exactly like the original, im uninstalling anything that is canon from my pc and im going to install it all again. i hope i can fix this as im not impressed.

 

[sivart]

Another option would be to upload the photo and have it printed online. Unless you have a large format printer I'm assuming you're going no larger than 8x10. I recently had a B&W picture printed by Shutterfly at 8x10 and it came out great.