Printing grey in color space

DN
Posted By
Daaavid_Noone
Sep 9, 2008
Views
211
Replies
1
Status
Closed
I’m REALLY hoping someone can help me at least find a direction to go in. I’m creating images in Photoshop and printing to a Xerox solid ink printer. If I print in greyscale everything is fine, but if I have an image that has both color and B&W portions, the greys come out green (or brown depending on whether I print from CMYK or RGB). Is there any way to have a portion of an image in a color space and others in greyscale?

Any tips on what I might try as far as the printer? If I print CMYK the greys come out really green but all the other colors are good. If I print RGB the greys come out browner (which is a little better), but other colors get muddy.

Is there any way to get a printer to stop trying to "interpret" greys as a color when in a color mode?

Thank you very much for anyone who can help.

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C
Curvemeister
Sep 9, 2008
One solution would be to run the paper through the printer twice, once for color and again for grayscale.

If that is not practical, my first suggestion would be to adjust your printouts for as neutral a result as possible. This can be done either in Photoshop, or in the printer driver itself, using the individual color sliders that are provided in the printer settings. Sometimes it is better to aim for an overall warm or cool appearance, rather than try to get a perfect neutral across the entire range.

Here’s a test strip and a procedure for doing this with a minimum of time and paper:
http://curvemeister.com/downloads/TestStrip/digital_test_str ip.htm

Photoshop also provides printer "transfer" curves for adjusting the output of the individual CMY colors – this is a somewhat archaic interface, originally intended for PostScript printers. They do provide more control than the manufacturer’s slider adjustments, so there you may find it useful in your situation.

If you will be doing much of this sort of thing, you may find it worthwhile to experiment with having a custom profile made for your printer. The procedure involves printing out a test image and sending it in to be measured, after which you receive a profile. Cathy’s is a good, reasonably priced service with a good reputation http://www.cathysprofiles.com/ . You may want to combine the custom profile with a final manual adjustment to get clean neutrals.

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