InDesign: green tint when printing greyscale images

[MattPXL]

I'm having a problem printing black and white images from indesign.cs. I'm working on a newsletter with about 10 black and white images in it. When I send the newsletter to my color printer (HP ColorJet 4500) all the black and white images come out with an olive green tint.

The only color i'm using in the newsletter is pantone 557 (olive green) with varying levels of opacity. Somehow the black and white images are picking up this tint. The images are defeintly greyscale, and when I print samples from my file browser they will print B&W with no green tint.

So far I have un-installed and re-installed Indesign, and updated my printer drivers, among other things. I have looked through all my settings and found nothing out of the ordinary. Any greyscale image i place into indesign has a green tint.

Please HELP!!!

Any ideas??? Thanks in advance
~Matt~

 

[tad1952]

Is the final newletter going to be printed on your ColorJet? If not, then don't worry about it - the file will print properly to film or direct to plate.

If so, the fix is quite easy but sounds really weird. We do large format printing & all our grayscale images have to be converted to cmyk in order to print properly. For some reason the RIP does something strange when it converts grayscale & it will pick up pink or green or blue hues depending on which printer it goes to. We convert them to cmyk and they come out as beautiful grayscale images. Go figure. Do a test & place a grayscale, rgb & cmyk version of the same image on one page & see which looks the most accurate on your ColorJet.

I design a 4-colour magazine which often includes grayscale images & the same thing happens when I print a proof to our Epson. But since it's not the final output device (the files go elsewhere for printing), I just ignore it knowing that the final product will print accurately.

If you are worried that the image is going to print in more colours than grayscale, just make a pdf & view it split for colour - the grayscale images will show up on the black plate only.

 

[MattPXL]

No, the final newsletter has already gone to a professional printer. We notified them of the problem and they said they "took care of it". The proofs they sent us were printed from a black and white laser printer, so we're hoping the final printing will be ok...

I'll try converting the images to CMYK tomorrow and see what happens...

Thanks for the help

~Matt~

 

[tad1952]

If the cmyk images look best on your proofer & you are adament about seeing them look right on your proofer, then you will have to save one set of cmyk for your proofs & 1 set of b&w only for the press file. Name them with corresponding names so that you can easily relink "image_01_cmyk" to "image_01_k" before you send your files to the printer.

Like I said, I just ignore the colour cast on my epson proofs. It's just not worth the hassle of making 2 sets of images & having to relink everything before sending the final product to press.

 

[Genimuse]

I had this same problem with ID and my HP Color LaserJet 4500. I eventually solved it the "right" way, I guess.

It turned out that my LaserJet was miscalibrated: too little magenta. Using the fine-tuning color calibration portion of the calibration page I managed to get it nicely balanced. Whaddya know, poof, my greyscale images were gray again.

Of course I should have figured this out on my own since 1 part C and 1 part Y and 1 part M and 1 part K should make a reasonable gray, but pull out the M and of course it turned green. Obviously I assumed that the 4500 would just use K but it seems to have a "rich black/gray" default instead.

 

[MattPXL]

I'm sure the printers took care of the problem, so I don't think we'll be seeing any green tint on our images...hopefully. For future reference I'll be sure to tell the next person who does the newsletter to convert the images to cmyk once the color has been removed...

thanks again...