How to sublimate a Black and White image?

[AdamB]

Hi all,

any advice would be greatly appreciated as this is the first time I have experienced any kind of problem since going with 'supported' inks and equipment.

I was asked to scan a photo and turn it black and white, then sublimate it onto a substrate. The converting to black and white was no problem (unless there is something I missed) but once it was pressed it had a very blue tinge to it.

I then reprinted the image as 'greyscale' but doing this affected the icc profile so it didn't print right.

I have searched through the forum for an answer as there's bound to be someone else who experienced the same issues but couldn't see anything.

If I'm repeating anything please slap me on the wrists and direct me to the relevant post.

Regards to all

Adam

[Paul]

;) thats wher new conwersation about icc start... Any way you need to to image, adjustmans and find option wher you can change the saturation of the image. Click colour picker and pick some gre colour of your pic. Not black, just grey. now you need to slide the red down. This way you reduce amount of magneta printed. Also you should notice that you pic is more b&w now. This is the only way to get descent grey scale of that usless profiles. But down side of it is that you changing skin tones a bit so you need to find sweetspot for your pic.


Ps. After you finish this order you can treat youself with custom Made greyscale profile.

[AdamB]

Many thanks Paul - i'll have a look later ................

;) Ps. After you finish this order you can treat youself with custom Made greyscale profile.

.............. why are you offering your services?

[Paul]

i dont provide profiling service but i can do it as a favour ;)

[JSR]

It's important to remember that the profile supplied with "supported" inks is a generic profile based on a printer that may have been manufactured to the other side of the tolerances to your printer. When printing full colour images, you normally don't notice because slightly off-colours don't affect the overall appearance. But when trying to get a specific colour, any deviation in the profile is noticeable. This goes double for black/greyscale because that's almost impossible to achieve with a generic profile.

Getting your own profile done should help achieve a much more neutral greyscale, but bear in mind that different substrates can reflect light differently and so you may still get colour casts unless you reprofile for the other substrate. A classic case in point here is the black mugs with white panels (the ones that go all the way around). Under different light sources, the greyscale looks blue. On a regular mug under the same light source, the greyscale may look red. It's not something that's easy to tweak, but a correct profile does help.

Without the correct profile, one way to get a greyscale that should be reasonably close is to use the "black only" or "greyscale" option in the printer driver. However, in order to make this work you need to turn *off* any profiles and settings that you would normally use in your software. It's important to send the print to the printer "as is" and let the printer then switch using black-only/greyscale (because that's the only way to ensure that the colour inks aren't used - if you choose the greyscale option in your software, it will attempt to use all the colours to create the greyscale, which relies on the profile that we've already determined isn't accurate enough).

I hope that makes some kind of sense.

[AdamB]

i dont provide profiling service but i can do it as a favour ;)

Paul - you are a true gentleman and a scholar (a top geezer), and I thank you so much for the offer but I will have a go at turning the icc profile off and using the greyscale option as JSR (is it Jonathon?) states below.

It's important to remember that the profile supplied with "supported" inks is a generic profile based on a printer that may have been manufactured to the other side of the tolerances to your printer. When printing full colour images, you normally don't notice because slightly off-colours don't affect the overall appearance. But when trying to get a specific colour, any deviation in the profile is noticeable. This goes double for black/greyscale because that's almost impossible to achieve with a generic profile.

Getting your own profile done should help achieve a much more neutral greyscale, but bear in mind that different substrates can reflect light differently and so you may still get colour casts unless you reprofile for the other substrate. A classic case in point here is the black mugs with white panels (the ones that go all the way around). Under different light sources, the greyscale looks blue. On a regular mug under the same light source, the greyscale may look red. It's not something that's easy to tweak, but a correct profile does help.

Without the correct profile, one way to get a greyscale that should be reasonably close is to use the "black only" or "greyscale" option in the printer driver. However, in order to make this work you need to turn *off* any profiles and settings that you would normally use in your software. It's important to send the print to the printer "as is" and let the printer then switch using black-only/greyscale (because that's the only way to ensure that the colour inks aren't used - if you choose the greyscale option in your software, it will attempt to use all the colours to create the greyscale, which relies on the profile that we've already determined isn't accurate enough).

I hope that makes some kind of sense.

Many thanks indeed. Yes it makes sense and I was trying to print out greyscale with the icc profile still active - this was causing another problem with the print. I have just done a test print (on paper) using the method you mentioned and it's a noticeable difference .............. not perfect but a very, very good improvement.

Thanks matey :-)

[JSR]

Many thanks indeed. Yes it makes sense and I was trying to print out greyscale with the icc profile still active - this was causing another problem with the print. I have just done a test print (on paper) using the method you mentioned and it's a noticeable difference .............. not perfect but a very, very good improvement.

On paper the greyscale from the black-ink option may look a little reddish (if you look at the black ink in the bottle, it has a bit of red about it). But this should return to greyscale after heating.