Digital BW, The Print

Yes, this is related to this thread, though loosely, so bear with me.

While sitting at my desk waiting for Cableone\u2019s tenth outage in eleven days to be over\u2026 (Yeah, you can trust one of the most expensive ISP\u2019s in American, THAT much!!!)

I realized that I have a piece of information tangentially related to this topic, that I have not made any effort to share widely and that should be shared, \u2018cause, you may need it! So\u2026

A little background. I don\u2019t like what ABW offers me, because I make really brown prints and ABW won\u2019t do anything more than sorta brown. So, one of the ways I get brown prints is this: I throw a color fill layer at the very top of my stack of layers (except text; text goes above that if you want it to still be black) and if you care, set it to 43, 100, 12 or 13, depending on my mood. This gives me the brown print I am after without using ABW and without having to actually convert the image to B&W.

One day about three years or so ago, my black inks decided to take a break, so I got a print that had little or no black ink on it. Now, a brown print ought to consist of the black inks, plus yellow and magenta. That\u2019s it. In fact, I have profiles for two different printers using two very different ink sets that prove that works just great. But what I GOT with the black inks absent, in addition to magenta and yellow, was CYAN!!! A LOT OF IT!!! A WHOLE LOT OF IT!!!! A deep, dark, heavy layer of CYAN!!!

So, the lesson here is that whatever you THINK you are laying down on paper using Epson\u2019s driver, Epson is quite possibly nullifying your choices. The cyan ink was mostly, almost exclusively, where the heaviest dark portions of the image were located. So, it seems that Epson thinks cyan can be used to somehow support heavy blacks, or that maybe they think it doesn\u2019t matter what color they put underneath a heavy deposit of dark tones, so they can even out ink usage across the cartridges. Who knows. These don\u2019t even amount to guesses, just baseless speculations. What is certain is that Epson\u2019s driver WILL use inks you don\u2019t expect/want it to use, and it is possible, this same thing is going on with the ABW driver. I didn\u2019t think to make a print using ABW while my black inks were vacationing, because I don217;t use ABW, so I can\u2019t tell you. If you get a black ink failure, make a brown print using ABW to see if Epson is performing this same trick there.