Pro-100 B&W Comments

[Mikesht]

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Plus, even when I print b/w by hand, I never get completely neutral b/w, and I dont like it as much. I sometimes toned them, but most of a time they come out toned already, based on paper I used.

In my experience the "tone" of a wet darkroom (b&w) print is more consistent or uniform compared to the often unpredictable color cast of a b&w print out of color inkjet printer. Furthermore different lighting of the prints can produce different color cast.
Newer inkjet printers are getting better because of gray inks, but they hardly achieve this pure b&w "look". Printing with only black and grey inks could come as close as possible to wet darkroom b&w prints.

I am also finding (during my very short experience with Pro-100 so far) that when using the Canon paper, I can get rather neutral b/w, but paper is plastiky. Good for framing but does not feel right in hands.
But when I use Ilford Gold Silk Mono, for example, which I like a lot better than Canon, the color management get a lot trickier. But as I said, color cast does not bother me, as long as it's a proper color cast

As far as different color cast under different lighting, I know what you are referring to exactly, but I find this to be a lot lesser issue with Pro-100 than with other prints I got from Mpix, Costco and other sources like that.

Mikhail
http://mikhailsteinberg.com/

 

[mikling]

There is an adjustment you can make for toning the B&W but it is not perfect nor as controllable as that on the Epson ABW feature. I put this down to dye ink itself. Dye ink color response will vary much more with the paper used as compared to pigment ink. Canon's drivers and the internal RIP preprogrammed inside the printer are matched to Canon's own paper. As soon as you stray outside of this, it can sometimes be difficult to retain the same response. The better way when straying outside of the Canon family of printer ink and papers is to use a custom profile is to use an ICC profile. Toning can then be carried out in the color domain with predictable results. Even though the print is sent to the printer as a color image, it will still use the gray inks as well as the color, just as it would have in the B&W option. However, the ICC will allow more predictable corrections for the ink paper response.

The other forgotten aspect to B&W when comparing the look of the output to that of traditional photos is that B&W has no real reference. Traditonal B&W was always taken with different filters to achieve different looks and was carefully adjusted in the darkroom and there were choices of the media used, both film and paper to produce a look. It was a craft and art was involved. Conversion of color images to grayscale does not produce the same. Further processing is needed to create dramatic B&W output.

The grey inkset for CMYK printers I referred to does not use the same grey inks in the Pro-100. Used in the Pro-100 the results are undesirable. It was created as a simple and inexpensive way to get occasional B&W output on the common Canon desktop printer without the use of profiles etc. 4 different shades of Black are used to substitute for the colored inks and printing is done with a normal driver. With matching papers, the output looks so close to to traditional darkroom, no one can tell it is in fact inkjet.

 

[Mikesht]

There is an adjustment you can make for toning the B&W but it is not perfect nor as controllable as that on the Epson ABW feature. I put this down to dye ink itself. Dye ink color response will vary much more with the paper used as compared to pigment ink. Canon's drivers and the internal RIP preprogrammed inside the printer are matched to Canon's own paper. As soon as you stray outside of this, it can sometimes be difficult to retain the same response. The better way when straying outside of the Canon family of printer ink and papers is to use a custom profile is to use an ICC profile. Toning can then be carried out in the color domain with predictable results. Even though the print is sent to the printer as a color image, it will still use the gray inks as well as the color, just as it would have in the B&W option. However, the ICC will allow more predictable corrections for the ink paper response.

The other forgotten aspect to B&W when comparing the look of the output to that of traditional photos is that B&W has no real reference. Traditonal B&W was always taken with different filters to achieve different looks and was carefully adjusted in the darkroom and there were choices of the media used, both film and paper to produce a look. It was a craft and art was involved. Conversion of color images to grayscale does not produce the same. Further processing is needed to create dramatic B&W output.

.

mikling,

Thank you for your comment.
What I normally use for BW printing are scans from BW film. Then they are processed slightly in Photoshop (dust, etc.) and brought to Lightroom and printed from there using the Canon's plugin.
So they are real BW to begin with, have "the look", although it is not the look of hand print, I do recognize the differences.
I always convert the scans to Gray mode and in LR I move the slider of saturation all the way to the left.
I also check "Black and White print" button in the plugin.
Still, after all this, as I print on Ilford paper, I get color cast. I counter it by printing that "variation print" and choosing the closest to my liking. Works reasonably well.

Mikhail
http://mikhailsteinberg.com/

 

[George in Georgia]

Hmmm... I'll have to try an experiment. I have a fine, sharp NEGATIVE taken on Kentmere ASA 100 35mm film. I scanned it to my computer and had Costco make a 8 x 12 BW print which they swore was silver process. I know it looks like a gelatin print. Costco does nice work, at least at my local store. So, I'll print that same file on my PRO 100, and, if I get daring, try my chops at wet work again with a used Beseler 23C and NOS Componon S f2.8 50mm lens. I need to get back to wet work, anyhow. I'm developing BW film, so it would be reasonable to do wet prints.

This whole process would let me make a proper comparison, if my wet work skills aren't too atrophied.....