Wide Format Imaging

When was the last time you saw a truly neutral black and white photograph produced on an inkjet printer? If your answer is never, read on. What makes this so difficult to achieve? With the precision of photo editing software, monitor calibration tools, ICC color profiles and new ink technology, you would think you could just set your printer or file to black and white and produce a black and white print to rival the best of Ansel Adams.

But that's not what happens, is it? Frequently your print has a magenta or green cast, poor black density, and a lack of detail in the shadows and highlights. This article will unravel some of the mystery around neutrality in inkjet printing and provide some insights and some options to produce neutral black and white prints.

Let's start with why we like black and white so much. Isn't black and white old, simple and without vibrancy?

Remember Gary Ross' Pleasantville where black and white represented innocence and boredom? It was color that represented vitality, excitement and risk. Yet in photos and art, the old, simple black and white image has depth and excitement well beyond the color equivalent. Maybe it's the lack of color that helps us focus on the details—the shadows and tonal ranges—more than if they were fire truck red or electric blue. That is why achieving neutral levels of gray is so important if you are working in a black and white photo medium.

History

Maybe you've been in the photo industry for years and remember the days of traditionally processing black and white images. Or you're new enough to printing that words like enlarger, fix, and stop bath mean nothing to you. Either way, the frustration in trying to achieve black and white neutrality is equally shared in digital inkjet printing.

Traditional black and white photography uses a silver-based process that requires chemistry to develop images onto paper. This usually means turning your basement or a portion of your studio into a darkroom for processing and printing. Most photographers celebrate their ability to transform a latent image on gelatin into the perfectly developed negative with the most dynamic range available. But it takes extensive testing to determine the exact amount of chemistry, time, temperature, and agitation to produce the perfect negative. Countless hours are then spent exposing, burning, dodging, masking, processing, fixing, and washing to produce the perfect print. And no two prints are ever the same.

Digital Capture

Today most images start life as a color digital capture. While there are certainly some holdouts that still prefer traditional analog photography, most of these are in the black and white world shooting 4x5", 8x10" or larger negative sizes, which will ultimately be scanned into a computer and printed digitally anyway.