Black & white photographs are widely accepted as the purest form of photography. A b&w picture presents the viewer with pure image tonality, line, form, shape and texture, totally free from colour distraction and influence. The b&w print is regarded by many ‘artistic’ photographers as the ultimate in creative expression. Producing a high-quality print in the darkroom is a skilled craft, but with today’s inkjet printers you can produce prints that will rival anything produced via wet chemistry. In this article, I will be looking at the various options for producing stunning prints with an inkjet printer.

Shooting for B&W
Most digital cameras have an option to capture in B&W or sepia – our advice is to shoot in colour and convert the images to greyscale using your image-editing software. This offers far more tonal control than the simple desaturate that digital cameras perform.

Inkjet Printing
Sending a greyscale image to your inkjet printer should produce a reasonable-looking monochrome print, but it can result in prints that display a slight colour cast. For most colour printing this cast may not be visible, but when you produce prints with grey tones, any shift in colour will be instantly visible.

Grey tones on an inkjet printer are made up from an equal mixture of the colour inks, for example, 128 red, 128 green, 128 blue produces a midtone grey (200 R, 200 G, 200 B produces a lighter shade of grey). If the mixture is not spot on, or your media doesn’t quite match the profile, then you may see a slight shift in colour in your prints.

In general, greyscale inkjet prints are made up by using a mixture (composite) of all the colour inks to produce all the subtle shades of grey. Besides a colour cast, a monochrome print can also suffer with metamerism, an effect that produces a different colour cast under varying lighting conditions, such as tungsten, daylight or fluorescent. Metamerism can be a nightmare for photographers who display their work at exhibitions or sell prints to collectors. However, many photo printers are now fitted with extra grey ink cartridges, which eliminate the need to mix colour inks to produce the subtle grey shades and address the metamerism problem.

Dedicated Monochrome Inks
Epson and HP produce printers with dedicated grey inks. Epson has the K3 inks, which are available on the R2400 (A3 printer) and its large-format printers, but unfortunately not on its A4 printers. HP has photo grey inks for the 8450 (A4) and 8750 (A3), as well as larger-format printers. Using these cartridges, the monochrome printing dramatically improves over-simulated greys using a composite of the coloured inks. Colour casts and metamerism are virtually eliminated. Besides manufacturers’ own inks, you can fit several (mainly Epson) printers with third-party monochrome inks.

Some products worth trying are Lyson Quad Black inks, available from www.lyson.com. Once fitted, these inks replace the printer’s colour cartridges, thereby creating a dedicated monochrome printer. To resume colour printing you would have to run several deep cleaning cycles using the normal colour ink set, to remove all traces of monochrome ink. This can be a costly process. If you are serious about monochrome printing, consider buying a printer purely for monochrome – it may be a cheaper option in the long run.