the art of digital b&w printing

8/2/2019 The Art of Digital B&W Printing

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The Art of Digital B/W #007

Take control of your black & white inkjet printing

with Inkjet Control

(PC and Mac)

1-Introduction

Are you satisfied with the quality of your inkjet black and white prints? If your answer is no youcame to the right place and help is on its way. What follows may just be what the doctorordered.

Many photographers who print in black and white are demanding users for whom RIPs and goodprofiles, even custom profiles, are not enough to satisfy them. They want more. What more?They want to control what their inkjet printer does. They are perfectionists for whom only theutmost level of control will do. If this sounds like what you are looking for, or if you find thisconcept intriguing, I believe you are going to love this article. Furthermore, it will most likely

point the way to better black and white inkjet prints. How much better can it get?We all know that the Epson driver, at least until now and before the release of Epsons K-3 line ofinkjet printers, was woefully inadequate at providing neutral (let alone good) black and whiteprints. Things may change with the latest generation of Epson printers. However, this is hard tosay since at the time I am writing this I have not tested the black and white printing capabilitiesof these new printers yet.

At any rate, even if Epson K3 printers leave nothing to be desired in terms of control and blackand white print quality (something that remains to be seen) tens of thousands of pre-K3 Epsonprinters will still be in use and for these a fine art black and white printing solution will continueto be necessary.

Hanlibinkya


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Taken in a remote area of NortheasternArizona, Black and White proved to be theway to print this image in order to expresshow I felt when I photographed this scene.Originally captured in color and converted toa black and white file with B&W DarkroomPro, this image prints beautifully with the

Inkjet Control and Inkjet Print Makercombination.

2-Introducing Inkjet Control

Introducing Inkjet Control, the solution youhave been waiting for. Released in March2003 Inkjet Control actually consists of twoapplications: Inkjet Control (IJC afterwards)and Open Print Maker (OPM afterwards). IJCis used for building the paper profiles andOPM is used for printing your photographs.

OPM is what is sometimes referred to as a"one up" printing application. It is not a RIP inthat it only allows you to import the image tobe printed, center it (or, otherwise, place theimage), select a profile (or blend two profilesin varying percentages), and print.

IJC on the other hand is where most of theaction takes place. IJC has a tremendousadvantage over other black and white printingsolutions (such as the very nice QuadToneRIP): it allows for manual tone editing. It also

allows you to turn off one or several specificprint heads so they do not fire at all. This is a very interesting feature that does wonder toeliminate metamerism from your prints. Since metamerism is mostly caused by yellow ink, nothaving the yellow print head fire means reducing or eliminating metamerism. IJC comes withseveral profiles which do just that, profiles that tell the printer to not use any yellow whatsoever.

3-Control the flow of ink

You can also control how much ink each print head lays down onto the paper, via a drop downmenu in IJC, by selecting a number from 1 (hardly any ink) to 26 (maximum ink). You can alsorecharacterize each print head as a specific ink color or shade of gray. Finally, you can edit theink curve directly, much like you would work in Curves in Photoshop, for the ultimate control.

IJC and OPM Icons

3-Make your own profiles in Inkjet Control

Making your own custom printer and paper profiles is what IJC is all about. Think of IJC Profilesas "recipes" that enable you to customize and control results from your specific printer, ink setand paper combination. IJC creates 16 bit profiles can be modified within IJC Ink TweaksWindow. There is one spline for every active print head and ink channel.


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Using the drop-down starter ink shapes you can select where an ink starts, where it ends andhow much of it to use. You dont have to be an expert in designing ink curves to get more out ofyour inkjet printer than you ever thought possible. What IJC does is give you control over yourinkjet printer by allowing you to control each print head separately in a very sophisticatedmanner.

The Open Print Maker dialog box for the Macintosh OS X version

4-Linearize your printers

Linearization is an Inkjet Control Feature that can be used to smooth out the bumps in aprofile curve as well as allow you to get similar prints on different printers. For example you canLinearize Profiles for an Epson 2200 and Epson 9600 to produce almost identical prints.Linearization also allows you to update a profile when a variable has changed, such as whenusing a different paper or printer.

Linearizing a profile is done by normalizing the intervals of a 26-Step Grayscale. To linearize aprofile you have to use either a densitometer (the best approach) or a scanner (less precise butdoable) to measure each patch of grey and enter each measured value in the Linearization

Window of IJC. The software automates the process once you have entered each value.

5-Blend Curves

Two profiles can be blended together using the Blender feature in IJC to achieve variations inhue and print tone. This feature, which is also found on other black and white printing software,is a very easy and efficient way to change the tone of a print without having to create a newcurve or modify an existing curve. Once you have neutral, cold and warm print tone curves justabout any variation of color and tone can be achieved by blending two curves in variousamounts.

Antelope Canyon Black and White


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My Navajoland Portfolio includesonly one black and whitephotograph and it has to match theprint quality of the 24 colorphotographs in the portfolio. I havesuccessfully printed it with bothQuadtone Rip and Inkjet Control.

6-Supported Printers

At the time this article is written(June 2005) following Epsonprinters are supported by IJC: 860,980, 1160, 3000, 1200, 1270,1280, 1290, 2100, 2200, 4000,7000, 7500, 9000, 9500, 7600 and9600 (some of these are Europeanmarket models not available in theUS)

7-Color printing

IJC/OPM does not print color. It onlyprints in Black and White.

8-Now what?

There are basically two ways to useIJC: you can use the profiles thatcome with the software and startprinting right away. This will giveyou excellent black and white printsas well as a choice of warm, neutralor sepia tones together with the

possibility of blending two profiles in various amounts to get a mix of two different tones.However doing so will only let you scratch the surface of what IJC can really do. To go furtherand explore the full potential of IJC you will need to either modify or linearize one of the providedcurves or create your own profiles from scratch. Doing so will allow you to create custom IJCcurves for your specific printer and paper combination, use a specific inkset or mix of inksets, oragain create entirely new curves to meet your exact needs or your visualization of a specific printquality.

An in-depth description of how to use all the features of IJC is beyond the goal of this article.What I want to do is introduce you to the main features and benefits of IJC. If you have read thisfar, and if you are getting more and more excited about what IJC can do for you, then it is timeto get your own copy and start exploring the possibilities of this unique software package.

9-Purchasing IJCIJC is available for both Macintosh OSX and Windows XP. At $250 it is a serious investment.However, if you are looking for complete control over the quality of your black and white printsthis is the ultimate tool.

You can get IJC at this link:http://www.bowhaus.com/services/IJCOPMmain.htm

10-Additional tutorials

There are a number of excellent tutorials on the IJC web site, at the link above.

In my estimate one of the best tutorial available so far is by Louis Dina.

Alain offers several tutorial CD's and a complete photography workshop program to help youreach the "next step with your photograhy. You can email Alain with your questions or commentsat [email protected].
http://www.bowhaus.com/services/IJCOPMmain.htmhttp://www.bowhaus.com/contributors/LD_tutorial_2_5_05.htmhttp://beautiful-landscape.com/Articles-CD-outbackphoto.htmlhttp://beautiful-landscape.com/Workshop-home.htmlmailto:[email protected]://www.bowhaus.com/contributors/LD_tutorial_2_5_05.htmhttp://beautiful-landscape.com/Articles-CD-outbackphoto.htmlhttp://beautiful-landscape.com/Workshop-home.htmlmailto:[email protected]://www.bowhaus.com/services/IJCOPMmain.htm


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the art of digital b&w printing

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