Black & White print question

[Colin]

What settings should I be applying for printing a B&W photo to achieve a proper grayscale? It seems that I am getting a "warm" tone (almost like a 10% sepia) and I want a cooler, neutral gray.

I'm wondering about the particular settings both when creating/exporting/saving the JPG (CMYK? RGB?), but also the particular settings in Versaworks that might have an effect on this, like the Color Management Preset - (PrePress US; Sign & Display etc).

Thanks

 

[LittleSnakey]

In versaworks use the following settings for good black and white/greys.
In the Quality Tab, Change the color management preset to Density control only.
I also try to use a profile that allows High quality with cmyk (v)w+pass mode to help with banding, but it will take longer to print.
Good luck, I have another one of these trailers coming this week.... all grey gradients.

 

[Colin]

Thanks. That certainly changed the tonal quality to what I wanted, but it doesn't print with as fine a resolution, even though I selected "High Quality" (1440x720) with the "MCVP: Matte Calendered Vinyl (ESM)" profile.

I am printing on matte cal, so is there another profile recommended? The image is a person's face, printed at 1" square, so any increase or decrease in resolution is really noticeable.

 

[LittleSnakey]

We use glossy vinyl so we use the (ripc) pcv3 premium cast vinyl (esm)
That allows the w+pass option and seems to help with banding.
maybe try that one.

 

[Colin]

I'm not having a banding issue, but I'll try that.

 

[Malkin]

As you make adjustmant bear in mind that Roland's black ink is slightly warm to start with, not truely neutral.

 

[Colin]

Aha! After noodling with various settings (on some larger B&W photo prints), I found that the culprit for the warm, almost sepia tone was the crap "Rite Media" profile. When I used the "SP-M: Matte PET" profile, wow, what a difference; I got the nice proper gray that I was after.

BTW, what media is that PET profile intended for?

 

[JoshLoring]

PET is short for punch elephants trunks. A profile that you should never use. Lol

 

[Colin]

I was wrong. It wasn't the Rite Media profile, it was how I had saved the JPG file in Photoshop. I had converted the colour photo to B&W and saved it, but the secret is, after doing the B&W conversion (and there are a few different ways to do that in PS) is to convert it to grayscale (Image > Mode > Grayscale) and then save it. This truly removes all “colour” from the file, whereas doing a simple convert to B&W does not.

The Rite Media profile seems to work just fine if that is done.

Now that I have printed off another sample, I can see that the PET profile didn't really make it a proper grayscale either; it had a slight green tinge, but again, that's because I hadn't saved the file properly.

Another trick is to bring the JPG into Illy and apply the Roland Spot color 22A to the JPG, and export it as an EPS. This works well too, even though it looks really purple on-screen.

Live & learn.