Digital BW, The Print

Olivier,

It may sound or be impractical, but I've done this most effectively by printing in two passes, one for B&W and one for color. I've even done it with registration on two different printers, but that was a lot of work and I found that for my purposes it was unnecessary. 

Separating the image allows control over the B&W that I think can get seriously blunted if done in a single operation, either by Photoshop's handling of the combined data or the printer driver. 

The practical way I've found requires that the print either be cropped by cutting to within the image, leaving a borderless print or by mounting under an overmat that cuts off the areas where the blended prints don't match perfectly and imagery that allows the colors to be blurred and printed lightly, like a gentle wash over the B&W framework. I'm sure there are other way to use this process, but that's what I use it for.

If you need good registration, close to 1 pixel, it is possible but requires adding a horizontal adjustment shim to one of the printers, putting registration marks on the leading edge of every print and a lot of playing around loading the paper for vertical alignment before each print. Even with such care I only got successful registration about once in 3 to 5 prints. 

Frank


Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 21:52:23 -0000
   From: "Olivier" <odesmais@...>
Subject: Blending BW and color in a single print

How would you proceed to produce a print with pure BW parts and  some colored ones on a 9800 loaded with K3.

QTR alone can not do it, Imageprint seems to handle this but is very expensive. I've not look at Qimage, but to my understanding it's not designed for this.

Any suggestion except a first class color profile (uncontrolable colors will still be there) or the expensive Imageprint ?

Thanks.

Olivier