DALTON ROONEY

I’ve been planning to sit down and write this for quite a while, but I’ve been keeping very busy with other things. The fact that it is currently hailing outside has given me the chance to spend some quality time indoors, though. Much like my previous post on scanning, I am going to try to avoid going into excruciating detail on every step of my digital printing workflow, because I don’t think it will be worth reading for most people. The general ideas are more important, and I am glad to answer any specific questions in the comments or offline. That’s not to say this won’t be a very technical post, and a long one at that. Please remember that I am giving this final print away to someone who has commented on one of the posts in the series, so feel free to drop a line even if it’s just to say hello.

Black and white inkjet printing felt like a very daunting subject when I first approached it. Two years ago, I had a low-end HP inkjet printer which made acceptable 8×10 color prints, but was absolutely lousy for black and white. It was impossible to get profiles for non-HP papers, and there was practically no information about archival permanence for the paper and inks I was using. In short, I wanted to create black and white prints on matte paper that looked as good as or better than what I could produce in the darkroom, and I wanted them to last a very long time. So I took the plunge into the deep waters of selecting a printer and building a solid black and white digital printing workflow.

I didn’t have a lot of people to talk to for advice, so I relied on books and Internet research. I highly recommend Mastering Digital Black and White by Amadou Diallo (with an accompanying user forum, sparse but useful) as an excellent starting point. It is a very deep and practical book on building a digital workflow, including system calibration, scanning and digital file conversion, editing, and printing. When I had questions that weren’t answered in the book, I relied on the community at Photo.net. I have mixed feelings about Photo.net; while there some very smart and helpful people on the site, you will often get a dozen different (sometimes conflicting) answers to a question, and you’ll occasionally come across someone who is entirely unhelpful. It’s a resource to keep in mind, though. Finally, I relied on dozens of different websites full of great information. I’ve linked to a couple below.

I eventually decided on the Epson R2400, a decision I haven’t regretted in the year that I’ve owned it. Like any powerful tool, working with the 2400 has its ups and downs: it sucks up ink like there’s no tomorrow (at $120 per set, that’s no joke), it jams frequently, and I had a terrible time with the driver software. Having overcome the software issue, though, I am now often amazed at the prints I am making.

Besides the hardware, there are three other critical components to the printing system: the ink, the paper and profiles, and the software to drive the printer. I use the standard Epson UltraChrome K3 ink set which includes three different black inks. I have considered switching to third party ink systems like Piezography K7 and MIS UT 3D, and could theoretically get somewhat better prints from one, but that would require investing in a continuous ink system and recalibrating everything, and I haven’t quite gotten there yet. I would love to see some samples from someone using one of those systems to see just how much better they are than the Epson K3 inks.

I proof on Epson Enhanced Matte and have settled on Moab Entrada Natural rag paper for final prints. As I mentioned, I prefer papers with a matte finish, and prints with a slightly warm tone, so Entrada Natural has been a good fit for me. It is 100% archival and includes no optical brighteners so the color won’t change over time. The paper base on the Natural is a slightly creamier color than the Bright version, and it has a very nice, soft finish.

When I first got the R2400, I tried printing with the Advanced Black and White mode built into the Epson driver, but I was never happy with the results. Advanced Black and White is a system that Epson recommends for providing completely neutral prints while avoiding the hassles of maintaining a properly color managed system. It does not rely on Photoshop’s color management system and theoretically does not require an exact paper profile either. You select from a list of Epson supplied settings (Moab suggests the Radiant White Watercolor setting) and let it do its job.

I tried again and again with Advanced Black and White, but never had any luck. The driver wasn’t printing linearly at all; tones that should have been smooth and continuous were completely posterized and blocked up. I tried troubleshooting for months, with varying degrees of failure. I tried using a color managed workflow too, with the ICC paper profiles supplied by Moab. That solved the posterization issue, but I wasn’t happy with the tonality or neutrality of those prints. Then I discovered Quad Tone Rip, a cross-platform shareware RIP program that is only $50.

Quad Tone Rip installed as a second printer driver on my Mac (I think the PC version is somewhat different) and includes a series of “curves” that correspond to particular paper and ink combinations. Luckily, QTR included a series of curves for Moab Entrada Natural papers and the Epson K3 inkset, so I gave it a shot. And phew! what a relief: deep blacks, delicate and controlled highlights, and perfect gradations all the way across the tonal range. If you ever want to see just how linear your printer driver is, try this test. I have a colorimeter which I have used in the past to make custom color ICC profiles for various papers, but I have never been able to improve on the default curves built into QTR for black and white. I use a split-tone combination of curves to create very warm shadows, slightly less warm mid-tones, and almost perfectly neutral highlights:

Now, I won’t lie: setting up QTR is not exactly straightforward. I had to spend a bit of time getting to know the software, but much like ColorNeg, the results are very much worth it. I have a lot of faith in my printing system now, I spend less time printing tests and wasting ink and paper, and my prints look wonderful.

There’s very little left to talk about in terms of printing an actual photograph. When we last left off, I had just finished processing my Vale of Cashmere photograph in Photoshop. Now that I am happy with the overall image, I can prepare it for printing.

First I flatten the image and make sure I’m in the right color space (I work in 16 bit grayscale and use the QTR Gray Lab space). Next, I resize the image to the final output size at a resolution of 360 PPI, which is the recommended native resolution of the Epson printer—that way the software doesn’t have to do any re-interpolation of the image.

A bit of output sharpening is necessary at this point, which is still more of an art than a science to me. I use a plugin called Focal Blade for sharpening, and generally go by the following rule of thumb: apply just a bit more sharpening than actually looks good on the screen, because the printer will soften it a bit. This sometimes takes a couple of tries to get just right. Focal Blade is nice because it allows you to apply less sharpening in highlight areas, therefore avoiding emphasis on the grain in skies where it can be most apparent.

A quick look at the print dialog in Photoshop:

The important details:

• Color Handling: Let Photoshop Determine Colors
• Printer Profile: QTR - Gray Matte
• Rendering Intent: Perceptual with Black Point Compensation

I usually do a few test prints to make sure that my overall tonal balance is good and I’m happy with the level of sharpening. I tend to print fairly dark, so there are often a few minor adjustments in curves to make sure I’m maintaining some detail in those shadows.

The final print:

It’s signed on the back and up for grabs! Leave a comment below and I’ll select someone by Friday to receive the free print.

Links:

Northlight Images has collected an impressive number of tutorials and links on digital black and white printing.

Clayton Jones has written an excellent series of articles about black and white printing.

Colin Jago’s posts on monochrome printing at Photostream are extremely helpful.

Another excellent print workflow post (Epson R3800), from Eric Chan.

A spirited discussion on fine art black and white printing on Photo.net. (Remember, take everything with a grain of salt! But there is good information hiding in this thread)

Finally, the Quad Tone Rip homepage. Especially useful if you are printing with an Epson 1800, 2200, or other printer that doesn’t have Advanced Black and White mode, or, like me, you aren’t happy with the results of Advanced Black and White mode.

This series of blog posts follows the process of creating an image from the beginning through to the final print. Click here to read other posts in this series.