Color tint spoils black and white print

Jennifer from Denver, CO, using Photoshop 6.0 with Windows XP, writes in with:

[Quote:]
I'm printing a small black and white image and it always prints with a reddish tint in Photoshop. I tried printing it in MS Word and it printed fine in it's original size (3"x3"), until I shrunk it down to 1 inch x 1 inch. Then it printed with a red tint again. It looks B&W on the screen. I reset the color settings on my monitor
... I tried to change the image to Grayscale from RGB.
I'm lost. I have no idea why it's doing this.
Any thoughts??
[END QUOTE]

If you can provide a good answer to this question, then comment below. Thanks for your help!

Comments

[Dan Pallotta]

Select the picture; go to the menu item “Format” and scroll down to “Picture”. In that window, click on the “Picture” tab. There should be an option for “Image control”, with a dropdown menu. Open that dropdown menu and select “Grayscale”, then try printing again.

It could be that Word or the print driver is rendering the grayscale image as RGB when you print. If your image is JPEG format, try using a grayscale TIFF image instead.

[Susan Ragan]

That doesn't work at all. I still have to find a way to make it totally black and white, but I know grayscale doesn't work.

[Brent]

Sounds like the printer is messing up. If your image is in Grayscale mode, then there's no way there's any color in it. Maybe take it to a local commercial printer and have them print it out on a B&W copier, that way there's no way any color will come out. Maybe clean your print heads and replace your ink cartridges on your printer.

[Dave]

We have a similar problem when printing in Black & White; getting a greenish tint like a sick duotone. We print primarily from Adobe Acrobat Professional. Sometimes we have to choose a radio button in the print menu under "Advanced" that reads "Print colors as black." Apparently many four and six color process printers create "richer" blacks by using all the colored inks along with black and the result is often a duotone effect that's undesireable. The "Print colors as black" option apparently disables the CM&Y and only uses the K. I have often seen this problem in getting black & white prints from digital cameras at local pharmacies.

[pat]

It is a typical problem in printing BW on desktop printers. If you select black Ink (or equivilant) you will loose much tonality. Printers attempt to solve this by adding colours to the BW print to compensate for the loss of tonality. A good alternative is to make a duotone or tritone etc out of your BW pictures. This will give you greater color control over the final tone of your print. Otherwise work closely with a good photolab which will make the necessary adjustments for you. Printing BW in this digital age is nothing short of a curse. Good luck!

[John]

I'm replying to this extremely late but I work as a graphic artist for a small printing company and so I believe I know what's going on. You are sending your file to print in black and white by producing black from your color toners. If you want it to print only in true black toner then you need to change the method of printing in the print controls (or page setup) as you print. There should be an option when you start to print that allows you to tell the printer to only use black toner or "Print Color in Greyscale" or some simular option. If you have told it to print using only black toner then any color tint is either a result of bad toner or a faulty printer.