Blue Over B&W

Through our church, I have connected with a congregation member who runs her own graphics arts firm here in Ellicott City. We have met and discussed several projects that I will be involved with as the principal photographer. This is part time work for me and I am really looking forward to it. Photographically at home I am restoring four B&W photographs from Jenne’s childhood. An additional image is a B&W of her grandmother from the 1920s or 30s. We don’t know for sure. Through this exercise I am learning more about Photoshop and my printer. Yesterday I had finished work on the image of her grandmother and tried to print it out. The printer diagnostic informed me that the printer was out of one of its six inks and the printer won’t print if a cartridge is empty. So, off to the store I went and I decided it would be best if I just bought one cartridge of each. It’s a good thing that I did because over the next four attempts to print the diagnostic informed that each of the colors – except black – was empty. I saved myself several additional runs to the store! So I finally get the image to print and it has a very blue cast to it. WTF! This is a B&W image with no color profile at all. Nothing! Nada! ZIP! I try the original untouched scanned image. Blue. I deep clean the print heads. Blue. I install a new printer driver. Blue. I adjust paper settings. Blue. I adjust file calculations in Photoshop. Blue. I look closely at the first try at printing this image and I notice a strip across the top of the image that is actually B&W and then it turns to blue. It must be the Black ink. The one color that the printer diagnostic did not say was empty. I replace the black ink cartridge. FINALLY B&W! But there is a slight green tint that I didn’t see until much later when Jenne pointed it out. ARGH! Well, I have replaced all of the inks, so I will try paper and other settings. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

This Blue over B&W incident reminds me of a story I was told by a fellow photographer named Tony. Tony is African American and that is important to the story. Tony dropped of some film of a family party for development. When he picked up the color prints he noted that they all had a slight blue tint. When he asked the lab tech why the blue tint he was told that it's because, "Black people look best in photographs when they have a blue tint, and that black people should always be photographed through a blue filter." How ridiculous and offensive. Tony demanded his images be printed without the tint and when he returned he showed the tech the difference and the improvement. No more blue tints.