Hi,
I had some questions for the individuals in this forum a month or so ago. I learned much information about B & W printing. At this point, I do not want to give up on my Canon iPF 6300 because I still think I can get the B & W output that I am looking for from it. I have what I think is a well calibrated Eizo monitor. In PS 2014 my processed B & W images look pretty neutral. When I print them they appear to have a slight color cast. So it looks like the printer is adding some color here. I do not mind printing a full sized version and then making some adjustments so that the second hard print is pretty much where I want it.
The problem is that I cannot tell with certainty what the color cast is. If I knew it was magenta or green I can easily correct that in PS. Because of metamerism it will change in different lighting conditions. I just purchased a used i1 Photo Pro 2 Spectrophotometer to see if I can spot check some areas in the print to determine which way the correct needs to go. It will give me LAB color data. If I get a negative number for the "a" channel does that mean that the spot area measured has too much green in it? How reliable is this method? Which areas should I be spot checking, shadows, highlights and mid-grays or just the grays?
I do not want to buy an Epson right now, nor do I want to get into piezographic inks etc. What I would like to do is improve my situation as it stands. I am using color profiles now. Maybe someone can tell me how to optimize these profiles for B & W. I have watched a number of X-rite videos. I saw one which mentioned Gray component replacement but did not explain very well how to go about it. Another mentioned patch weighting and using a more negative number instead of the default of 0, but I cannot seem to use that option. I am going to assume that it is only available with CMYK printing.
Any help to get some improvement here would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Jim