Printing black & white on Canon S820

Is there a way to get the Canon S820 to print using ONLY the black ink

cartridge? My gray-scale Photoshop images come out with a magenta

cast. I'm converting my black & white images to RGB and turning OFF

the gray scale box in the driver so that I can manipulate the

intensity of each color ink cartridge, but there's got to be a better

way for my occasional need to print in black & white.

 

Thanks, Jonathan Curtis

Hi Jonathan, I don't have the Canon, but this is a problem with almost all inkjet printers. Just wondering - have you profiled your display and printer/paper combinations? I've had good luck with this technique and my Epson and it bypasses using a profile for B&W: 1) Convert your image to Colormatch RGB 2) Desaturate image prior to printing but do NOT convert to grayscale. 3) Print using your printer's highest automatic setting. Not sure if it'll work as well for you, but it does great with my 2200. YMMV. Best wishes . . .

Thank you, Beau and Jeff for your responses.

 

Beau, I tried your sugggestion to convert to ColorMatch RGB followed by Desaturation, but I still get the same distinctly magenta cast after printing.

 

Jeff, I understand your point about not using just black due to contrast issues so I've tried removing the color cast both by removing the magenta in Photoshop as well as by adjusting the color controls in the Canon S820 driver. I can change the color cast, but so far, I have not been able to totally neutralize any cast, thereby matching the black & white darkroom print that I originally scanned (which I scanned in gray scale, by the way�then converted to CMYK in Photoshop). It seems to be a very hit or miss process, consuming large amounts of expensive Canon Photo Paper Plus and inks.

 

Specifically, I removed the magenta in the Photoshop file by using the Hue/Saturation adjustment and running the magenta all the way down to -100. For good measure, I also totally desaturated every other color as well as the master slider, but that put me back to a magenta cast print�even though I had moved the Canon magenta slider all the way down to the minimum. So I went back to the Photoshop hue/saturation adjustment layer and restored all color saturations to their default 0 setting EXCEPT the magenta. The resulting print is no longer magenta, but it has a distinctly cool cast. Then I set cyan to -25 saturation, which reduces some of the cool cast, but the prints are still not completely neutral. Increasing the yellow saturation slider in an attempt to warm up the prints has no effect; my choices seem to be either a slightly magenta cast or a slightly cool (cyan?) cast.

 

Is there a better way to remove the magenta in the Photoshop file and/or remove the magenta cast during the printing process?

 

Thanks for your patience, and thanks for your input.

I fought this same issue with my earlier Epson photo printers - always had a color cast to the BW prints. My solution was to simply accept it and work with it by printing duotone - at least, I can choose what color I will get. In fact I get nice sepia toned prints.

In all truth, I never try BW anymore on any digital printer - I use my traditional BW darkroom when I want BW prints. I save the digital printers for when I want color. This may not be an option for you, and hope that the printer companies - Epson, HP,- will one day make a dedicated BW printer for people like ourselves.

I agree with Wally, with my antiquated Deskjet 1000c, there seemed to be an improvement in tone as well, when printing sepia/blue dual tone. For a very helpful dual tone tutorial, check out:

 

http://www.computer-darkroom.com/tutorials/tutorial_2_1.htm

 

Re. ink jets for black and white:

 

http://www.photo.net/mjohnston/column35/