Sunday, March 14, 2004
Monochrome Printing on Photo Printers: What's the Best Approach?
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 05:00 PM
Based on the last post that I did, I thought I'd try a little experiment. There are two ways to get a black and white (monochrome) print from a colour ink jet printer: you either take the colour image and put the printer in monochrome mode (if the driver supports it - most will), and this puts the responsibility of converting the image onto the shoulders of your print driver. The alternative is to take your colour image, and using a photo editing program, convert it to a monochrome image. This is different from making a greyscale image, because that down samples the image from 24 bit colour to 8 bit greyscale.
Using Picasa, I made a 4x6 print of a colour photo on my Canon i950 printer with everything set to maximum quality. I then checked the "Grayscale Printing" box, and the resulting image looked like this (the image was scanned on an hp psc 2510 at 600 dpi then down sampled 50% and saved as a 90% quality JPEG using PhotoImpact).
Next, I took the same colour image and loaded it into PhotoImpact, then using the Monochrome filter, converted it to a black and white image while still retaining the 24-bit data. I then loaded this B&W image into Picasa and created a 4x6 print - with the print driver set to print a colour image, not monochrome. The resulting print came out looking like this.
Lastly, to round out the experiment, I took the above monochrome image and put it through the same printing process, except this time I selected "Greyscale Printing" in the Canon driver. The result looked like this.
Depending on what type of monitor you're using, and if it's colour calibrated or not, you may not see what I'm seeing in person when looking at these prints. The differences between the three prints are subtle, no doubt about it. To the casual glance, they look identical. When I look at them closely, I see subtle differences - the colour image printed in monochrome has a slightly different hue than the other two, tending toward the blue/grey, but only slightly. The monochrome image printed out in colour and the monochrome image printed in monochrome look similar, but the monochrome/monochrome seems to have more in the way of highlights, especially in the forehead/face area. To me, this third print looks the best of all three, but your own results will vary heavily based on your printer and the software you use to transform your images.
The lesson here? A dedicated photo editor will likely do a better job of converting your colour images to monochrome than a printer driver, but even when printing colour images and letting the driver do the work, the differences are subtle.
Using Picasa, I made a 4x6 print of a colour photo on my Canon i950 printer with everything set to maximum quality. I then checked the "Grayscale Printing" box, and the resulting image looked like this (the image was scanned on an hp psc 2510 at 600 dpi then down sampled 50% and saved as a 90% quality JPEG using PhotoImpact).
Next, I took the same colour image and loaded it into PhotoImpact, then using the Monochrome filter, converted it to a black and white image while still retaining the 24-bit data. I then loaded this B&W image into Picasa and created a 4x6 print - with the print driver set to print a colour image, not monochrome. The resulting print came out looking like this.
Lastly, to round out the experiment, I took the above monochrome image and put it through the same printing process, except this time I selected "Greyscale Printing" in the Canon driver. The result looked like this.
Depending on what type of monitor you're using, and if it's colour calibrated or not, you may not see what I'm seeing in person when looking at these prints. The differences between the three prints are subtle, no doubt about it. To the casual glance, they look identical. When I look at them closely, I see subtle differences - the colour image printed in monochrome has a slightly different hue than the other two, tending toward the blue/grey, but only slightly. The monochrome image printed out in colour and the monochrome image printed in monochrome look similar, but the monochrome/monochrome seems to have more in the way of highlights, especially in the forehead/face area. To me, this third print looks the best of all three, but your own results will vary heavily based on your printer and the software you use to transform your images.
The lesson here? A dedicated photo editor will likely do a better job of converting your colour images to monochrome than a printer driver, but even when printing colour images and letting the driver do the work, the differences are subtle.
