Colour of black & white prints

Shaped tree, Stourhead, April 2007

I've been running a series of black and white prints over the weekend, together with a load of colour prints. Main aim has been to optimise the colour profile settings to get the most out of each print, in combination with the printer settings.

Pretty much sorted on colour prints, whether from Lightzone or Photoshop. I can get consistent image matches to my screen, especially with shadow details and the prints look consistent under different lighting conditions. Job done.

For B&W it's a whole different story. I can get prints that look good in day light, good under tungsten, good close up, good at a distance but none seem to be good under all conditions. Most worrying are the colour casts and how they perform at different distance and lighting.

I realise that I'm not going to get any one that is perfect due to the split of tungsten (regular light bulb) and daylight viewing, but I'd hope that they'd at least be consistent over distance. Prints under grey-scale printing option appear to have a sight red lour cast, except when close-up in daylight. last night it was particularly pronounced.
Without grey scale but using a monochrome colour profile, there is a slight green cast, but it largely disappears under tungsten and definitely as you move away from the print. Whilst I don't have a dedicated B&W printer, I'd have hoped to get some decent prints that can stand up to putting the wall.

Only 2 more things to try, removing all the colour info in Photoshop and a change in paper. I'm not sure the old printer is really up to photo printing.