Sending B&W scans to drug store Kodak printer

[Seascape Man]

Hi Folks,

I've been scanning 4x5 Kodak Tmax with an Epson V700 at 2400 dpi, in the Epson software 8-bit B&W mode.

I want to get 8x10 "work" prints from a nearby drug store that says they have the very latest and greatest Kodak printer. They told me it is not an inkjet type printer but one that gets color from the Kodak paper itself.

I have Photoshop and would generally be doing curve adjustments and sharpening beforehand.

I know the quality won't be close to what I'd get from contact prints or optical enlargements, but this seems to be the best way for me to print dozens or hundreds of prints right now so I can see what I'm shooting.

Because my files are B&W, I'd like to know the best way to prepare them for this kind of Kodak kiosk. I imagine they should go out at 300 dpi, but should I send them as RGB? Or TIFF? And what exactly is sGray? Would that just be treated by commercial printing kiosks as RGB? Would it offer any benefit at all, or would it just mess everything up for the drug store printer?

Should I alter any of the CYMK values along the way, so my black comes out the darkest possible black? CYMK is still a very esoteric subject to me. I'm not confident it even applies. But I read somewhere that it might.

Any workflow ideas on this would be much appreciated.

I have also asked the drug store to call Kodak for me and get suggestions directly from the horse's mouth.

Thanks in advance for any input!

Ashton

 

[Greg_E]

That machine probably won't know what to do with CMYK images, so don't mess with that. What you should probably do is get a couple of test prints in 4x6 or something else cheap. Give them the images in RGB and in grayscale color spaces and see what happens. Chances are that it will really only work well with the RGB images. And be prepared for disappointment in the quality. It is very likely that you will see color shifts in different areas of a white to black graduation, and depending on exactly what type of printing they are using, you might see the color shift in different types of lighting.

There are 1 or 2 types of real B/W paper made for these modern machines. It's been a while since I've kept up on this, so my info is a little out of date. Check with http://www.prodpi.com and ask Jeff Lazo if he ever found a good B/W paper to use with his machines? Tell him I sent you.

 

[Seascape Man]

Thanks, Greg.

Regarding CYMK, I was actually wondering if there is a benefit to converting to CYMK, adjusting the values to get a true black, and then converting back to either TIFF or sRGB.

Thanks for the referral to your friend.

Ashton

 

[Greg_E]

If you were printing to a real CMYK device, then you could maybe gain something by converting the image into the K channel so that you only had black ink on the paper. But after that the more conversions you do, the more data could get lost. So you really won't have any gains converting to CMYK and then to RGB.