Monochrome Printing on Photo Printers: What's the Best Approach?

[Jason Dunn]

Based on the last post that I did, I thought I'd try a little experiment. There are two ways to get a black and white (monochrome) print from a colour ink jet printer: you either take the colour image and put the printer in monochrome mode (if the driver supports it - most will), and this puts the responsibility of converting the image onto the shoulders of your print driver. The alternative is to take your colour image, and using a photo editing program, convert it to a monochrome image. This is different from making a greyscale image, because that down samples the image from 24 bit colour to 8 bit greyscale.<br /><br />Using Picasa, I made a 4x6 print of a colour photo on my Canon i950 printer with everything set to maximum quality. I then checked the "Grayscale Printing" box, <a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/colourimage-monochromeprint.jpg">and the resulting image looked like this</a> (the image was scanned on an hp psc 2510 at 600 dpi then down sampled 50% and saved as a 90% quality JPEG using PhotoImpact).<br /><br />Next, I took the same colour image and loaded it into PhotoImpact, then using the Monochrome filter, converted it to a black and white image while still retaining the 24-bit data. I then loaded this B&amp;W image into Picasa and created a 4x6 print - with the print driver set to print a colour image, not monochrome. The <a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/monochromeimage-colourprint.jpg">resulting print came out looking like this.</a><br /><br />Lastly, to round out the experiment, I took the above monochrome image and put it through the same printing process, except this time I selected "Greyscale Printing" in the Canon driver. <a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/monochromeimage-monochromeprint.jpg">The result looked like this.</a><br /><br />Depending on what type of monitor you're using, and if it's colour calibrated or not, you may not see what I'm seeing in person when looking at these prints. The differences between the three prints are subtle, no doubt about it. To the casual glance, they look identical. When I look at them closely, I see subtle differences - the colour image printed in monochrome has a slightly different hue than the other two, tending toward the blue/grey, but only slightly. The monochrome image printed out in colour and the monochrome image printed in monochrome look similar, but the monochrome/monochrome seems to have more in the way of highlights, especially in the forehead/face area. To me, this third print looks the best of all three, but your own results will vary heavily based on your printer and the software you use to transform your images.<br /><br />The lesson here? A dedicated photo editor will likely do a better job of converting your colour images to monochrome than a printer driver, but even when printing colour images and letting the driver do the work, the differences are subtle.

[Todd_B]

For great looking B&W images, try the new HP Photosmart 7000 line of printers using the number 59 photo grey cart. The pictures look like true b&w images. They do not have the purple/pink tones that you normally get when printing B&W pictures.

Todd

PS. Same post, different forum, but I am a die hard HP printer fan....

[Neil Enns]

I've never tried it before, but apparently there's a system called Piezophotography that helps get high-quality B&W prints out of regular inkjet printers. There's a discussion about it at http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/piezo.shtml and you can get info about the software itself from http://www.inkjetmall.com/.

Neil

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

I'm with Todd. The new printers look very promising!

[Lotto]

Interesting...last summer I experimented with b&w photos a bit. I found taking a color picture and using software to convert it to b&w produced a MUCH better picture than using my camera's b&w setting. Wonder why that is?

[Jason Dunn]

Interesting...last summer I experimented with b&w photos a bit. I found taking a color picture and using software to convert it to b&w produced a MUCH better picture than using my camera's b&w setting. Wonder why that is?

Probably for the same reason why a dedicated photo editing app is better than a printer driver - better coding, better algorithms for converting the image.

Besides, I always caution people against using any of the special colour modes on cameras, because you'll never be able to get that image back - it's much better to do it all in post-processing.

[Lotto]

Ok so I was watching 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy' (bear with me this really has relevence)....and they were making over a budding photographer. When discussing his work with a professional, they asked him if he's ever tried to print out his own digital photographs. He said no, because he only had a color printer and he knew that was not optimal for printing out b&w images.

Is this true. Do b&w photos come better on a b&w printer? I was under the assumption that a color could print b&w equally as well (and in my mind maybe even better because of the more shades possible with color ink available.)

Can someone set me 'straight' on this Queer Eye question?

[Jason Dunn]

Is this true. Do b&w photos come better on a b&w printer? I was under the assumption that a color could print b&w equally as well (and in my mind maybe even better because of the more shades possible with color ink available.)

Urm...not to be rude, but did you read the first post in this thread and look at the sample images? That's exactly the question I was addressing. ;-) I don't have a B&W printer (I'm not aware of a high-quality inkjet printer that exclusively does B&W), but I did a sample print in monochrome, which presumably only uses the black ink cartridge.

[Lotto]

Yes I did read it....but this guy made it seem he could not print proper b&w with a color printer. I wondered if having a b&w dedicated printer was really necessary. Is the difference that great? or at all?

[Jason Dunn]

Yes I did read it....but this guy made it seem he could not print proper b&w with a color printer. I wondered if having a b&w dedicated printer was really necessary. Is the difference that great? or at all?

But...that's why I uploaded those image samples. :-) You can look at them and decide for youself if colour printers (well, at least my colour printer) are capable of doing B&W prints properly.

It's his artistic opinion that colour printers cannot reproduce b&w photos properly, but you can make up your own mind based on the samples that I printed and scanned.

For me, I was satisfied with the monochrome image + monochrome print - I liked the way it looked.

[Lotto]

I also found the images perfectly acceptible, but not having seen one off a b&w dedicated printer thought maybe I was just missing the boat on something. Sorry didn't mean to make this confusing.

[Jason Dunn]

I also found the images perfectly acceptible, but not having seen one off a b&w dedicated printer thought maybe I was just missing the boat on something. Sorry didn't mean to make this confusing.

No worries. The thing is, I don't think there IS a dedicated B&W printer out there - the most you can do is buy black inks for a colour printer and tell the printer to use black ink only, which is what I did. So in some ways, it seems much-ado about nothing...?

[ctmagnus]

The thing is, I don't think there IS a dedicated B&W printer out there

Unless you want a really, really old printer ;)