B&W Prints from Canon Inkjet

Hi

Black and White prints from my Canon MP800 printer all have a slightly purple hue to them. I've tried pressing the grayscale button, but this has no improvement.

The black and white shots are created by changing the mode of colour photos to 'grayscale' in PS Elements 2.

If anyone has suggestions, I'd be very grateful. This is my first posting in this forum.

BTW - another problem I'm having is faint horizontal black lines being printed on some photos.

Steve

Using - Canon MP800, Canon Photo Paper Plus (semi-glossy), Photoshop Elements 2, Mac OS X 10.4, Canon G3.

Regarding your Black and White question: Your Canon Inkjet is using dye ink I believe and so when it does b&w it tries to make the various gray sections of the photo print with black and some other colours probably magenta. This is because it has no gray ink. The Black is black and the white is white but the grays are a mix of things and so it is almost impossible to get a really good b&w print unless you go to a pigment printer like the Canon Pro 9500 or the HP 9180 etc. They have black ink and gray inks to give the prints more exact black and white and gray tonalities.

As for the line on your prints I am not certain what causes it so I wont comment except to say you should probably call Canon support if it persists. Good luck!

Leo
--
mitch

This post shows how Canon generates a gray scale gradient by printing with only one ink at a time - great information!
http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=8390#p8390

Hi StevieG35

StevieG35 said:

Black and White prints from my Canon MP800 printer all have a
slightly purple hue to them. I've tried pressing the grayscale
button, but this has no improvement.

Click to expand...

The grayscale and the colour button on the MP800 are for copying only and have no effect on prints. If you wanna be sure not to use the color mix mode to generate BW but the black cartridge only you have to set it to monochrome in the driver, not on the printer itself.

My experience with the MP800 is that it is very diffucult to get a BW print without a colorcast. If you buy a profiling kit like the Colorvision PrintFIX Pro (www.colorvision.ch) you can make a custom profile for your printer and paper, which helps a lot. From my experience the PrintFIX Pro profiles are way better than the canned ones from Canon, even on their own paper. After generating the profile, you can also make adjustments for colorcasts to eliminate them. My colorcast was green, and I have almost removed it and gotten as close to neutral BW as possible with a dye based printer. Still after all this fine tuning I wouldn't recommend it for BW photos. Also be aware, that the profiling kit I mentioned costs almost as much as the printer.

StevieG35 said:

The black and white shots are created by changing the mode of
colour photos to 'grayscale' in PS Elements 2.

Click to expand...

Try looking in the retouching forum. There are way better ways to convert your images to BW than changing the mode. It generated a very flat and uninteresting BW conversion.

StevieG35 said:

BTW - another problem I'm having is faint horizontal black lines
being printed on some photos.

Click to expand...

I have it as well in very black areas. Try a printhead adjustment in the printer driver. It helps some time, but this is not a fine art printer, aven though it creates stunning color photos it defenetly shows it faults in BW.

Don't misunderstand me, I am happy with my MP800 for general use, but if you wanna have the best in BW you ganna go elsewhere.

Kind regards
Klaus

Thanks for all your helpful advice. It makes perfect sense. I've just been having a flick through my PS manual about better ways of converting a colour image to b&w - thanks for this pointer too!

Best wishes
Steve

for a quick fix once you have desatuated your image in Photoshop try altering the colour balance to

cyan +10
yellow +10

in midtones