Digital Photography Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 51 Amazing B&W Prints from Your Inkjet Printer

For a couple hundred bucks you can convert your
Epson or Canon printer into a high-end black-and-white
darkroom.

Digital photography is based on a long history
of techniques and tricks hammered out over a hundred years of film
photography. The metaphors used by Photoshop are rooted in the
lexicon of film photography. Filters, contrast, burning and dodging,
color balanceall these terms come directly from analog
photography.

This hack takes a sacred part of traditional photography, the
silver halide print, and turns it on its head. How? By
using the traditions of offset printing, in which different shades of
black are applied in layers to create super-rich B&W prints. Go
to one of your favorite bookstores and pick up a book by a
photographer that has black-and-white photographs. That book is
printed on an offset printer and the image is made up of thousands of
tiny dots to trick your eye into seeing continuous tone.

Silver halide prints, on the other hand, are
continuous tone and, because of this, are incredibly rich.
A higher-quality black-and-white photography book will try to mimic
this quality by printing duotones that use two
layers of ink to create richness that can't be
accomplished with just one layer of black ink. This results in a
higher-quality image that looks closer to its continuous-tone
original: the silver halide print. Many books are printed using
tritones
(three
shades of black) or even quadtones
(you
guessed it, four shades of black). Quadtones will generally be richer
than duotones.

So how in the heck does this apply to digital photography? Well, some
pretty clever people out there have figured out how to turn your
Epson printer into a quadtone black-and-white printer.
That's rightyou can take the cyan, magenta,
yellow, and black cartridges out of your printer and replace them
with cartridges that are four shades of black, as shown in Figure 5-8.

Figure 5-8. Replace color cartridges with special black ones for quadtone printing

Printing quadtone images is complicated, because it requires both a
software and a hardware solution. Someone (or something) has to
figure out which parts of the image should be printed in which tone.
Then, that software needs to communicate with the printer to lay down
the different shades of color correctly. Don't
worry; you don't have to start draining your
cartridges and putting in custom shades of gray, and you
don't need to start writing software yourself.
Piezography has done all of this for you by devising
a system by which different shades of black ink are carefully
controlled by your computer to create stunning B&W prints.

Piezography is a combination of ink cartridges and
International Color
Consortium (ICC) profiles that together will have you creating
incredible digital black-and-white prints pretty quickly. The
International Color Consortium created ICC profiles as a way to
manage color across all computer platforms. ICC profiles that work on
both Macs and PCs (all Macs and most versions of Windowscheck
the tech specs for more details) are available for most Epson inkjet
printers and some Canon printers.

You can pick yourself up ink cartridges and a profile for your printer at http://www.inkjetmall.com.

The ICC profile is specific to your printer and the kind of paper you
are going to print on. Piezography can be performed on a surprisingly
wide array of Epson inkjet printers, from the lowly Epson 8.5 11
photo printers all the way up to the super-large-format Epson 10000.

To start out, you should purchase a starter kit to see if Piezography
is for you. The kit includes Piezography ICC media profiles, a set of
piezotone ink cartridges, a set of flush cartridges, a manual, and 10
sheets of assorted sample papers. Expect to spend anywhere from
US$200 to $400 for this kit, depending on which printer you own.

You can also purchase a bulk ink kit. This is cool, because it lets
you run your printer for long periods of time without having to
change cartridges. Instead, you have ink bottles that sit next to the
printer and are connected, via small tubes, to the ink cartridges in
your printer, feeding them ink. This also results in a significant
cost savings over all those cartridges you end up buying and throwing
out. Remember that bulk ink kits are simply a function of economics:
the more you print, the more they make sense. Since you probably want
to see how well Piezography works for you before investing in a bulk
ink kit, you should probably try the cartridges first.

Since these inks are going to replace your current ink set, the first
thing you need to do is thoroughly clean your printer so that there
is no old ink to mix with the new. Piezography inks are purely pigment-based,
which allows for a greater dynamic range and the creation of truly
archival prints. Making sure that your old Epson ink is clear so that
the Piezography inks can work properly is an important first step.
Install the flushing cartridges and print an image provided on the
included CD a few times. This will ensure that your inkjet heads are
clean and ready for the new Piezography inks. Some of the larger
printers have slightly different flushing procedures, so make sure
you read the manual.

Now that your printer is ready to print with pigment-based, archival,
black-and-white inks, you need to get your monitor ready. To get the
best results, make sure your monitor is calibrated. Then, load up the
ICC profiles included with your starter kit. What you see on your
screen in Photoshop will match what you see when you print using
Piezography inks. It's that easy.

The system works best when you calibrate your monitor (whether Mac or
PC) to Gamma 1.8. You do all your work in
the grayscale color space. Don't worry; you
don't have to shoot your digital images in color.
You can pick and convert your color images to grayscale.

When you are ready to print, you can
soft-proof. This will display an image on
your screen that is unbelievably close to how it will print. One
important thing to remember, however, is that the ICC profiles take
into consideration the kind of ink set you are using, the model of
printer you are using, and the type of paper you are printing on.
Therefore, if you want to try different types of paper, you need to
buy and use the ICC profile for that particular paper. This allows
for the soft-proofing feature, on a color-calibrated monitor, to be
accurate. Once the image is where you want it and you have made the
adjustments you need in Photoshop, it is time to print. Depending on
your printer, expect the print job to take 2 to 10 minutes.

Print speeds vary depending on your printer. The Piezography print
system is a true replacement for a traditional black-and-white
darkroom. For a couple hundred bucks, this hack will turn you into a
master printer of digital black-and-white photos.

Hadley Stern