How to check if a sepia image is a true monochrome

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Any advice on how to check this? Ive converted an image using a preset sepia tone. When printing, it look a bit pinky in places. This print is going into a competition and needs to be a true monochrome and I wanted sepia instead of black & white. Can I check the colour values file in photoshop? Or is it an issue in the printing? Ive used the correct paper profile.
 
When I produce Sepia I use the Special B&W facility on my printer which will print B&W using the three Black inks but if set toned it adds a small amount of colour which is fine. Before I had this type of printer, I found trying to print images a neutral grey was almost impossible due to metamerism. I normally used to tone all such images which hid the effects.

However, is it really so bad that it might not meet the competition rules. At my club, we would be reasonably lenient if it was clear that it was intended to be a single tone though you cannot stop a judge criticising if he/she picks this up.

Dave
 
When I produce Sepia I use the Special B&W facility on my printer which will print B&W using the three Black inks but if set toned it adds a small amount of colour which is fine. Before I had this type of printer, I found trying to print images a neutral grey was almost impossible due to metamerism. I normally used to tone all such images which hid the effects.

However, is it really so bad that it might not meet the competition rules. At my club, we would be reasonably lenient if it was clear that it was intended to be a single tone though you cannot stop a judge criticising if he/she picks this up.

Dave


Thank you. Ive reprinted and reduced the red saturation a tad. Improved but not 100% happy. Hopefully a judge thats colour blind!
 
I am assuming that you do not have a specialist printer such as an Epson R2889 or P600 as you would not have this problem when using the Advanced B&W mode. I have recalled how I used to deal with this before I had one of these printers but you need the full version of Photoshop for this. You probably already know that printing B&W using RGB results in a lot of the colour ink being used but the use of multiple colour inks does increase the number of tones but often at the expense of metamerism. If you convert to a greyscale image, you will get a true grey but you may have as few as 50 grey levels only because only one ink is used. You could try in PS a method called Duotone. Use image>Mode>Grayscale then Image>Mode>Duotone. You will then be offered a selection of tones. You will have to experiment a little but I found this was a good improvement on RGB or just Grayscale.

Dave
 
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