With a darkroom, monochrome was easy and color was hard. Now it's actually the opposite.
I've been selling some prints lately, at a gallery down the road, from where I'm living in Paris. They're black-and-white 13x19 art prints. It's kind of strange that black and white still sells in an age of color. As strange as the contortions I have to go through to make black-and-white prints.
In fact, I've been learning that black and white is hard to do at home on an inkjet. With a darkroom, monochrome was easy and color hard. Now it's actually the opposite.
It's a paradox of digital technology that all monochrome pictures start out as color captures, and most black and white prints are now run off on color printers. However, digital black and white requires better color management than real color if you want a neutral print!
I've tried all the tricks in the book so far, to make digital black and white from digital color. I've tried: straight black-and-white conversion in Photoshop; desaturating; the channel mixer; conversion plug-ins; tinting the photos; printing them with black ink only; printing them with color ink; and my own custom profile.
All of the above conversion techniques work, to a degree. All the above have allowed me to sell prints. All the above leave me feeling unsatisfied.
My latest monochrome printing experiment is Roy Harrington's $50 Quadtone Rip software. This is a replacement for my native Epson driver that allows subtly toned cool or warm prints to be generated very easily. I haven' tried the more expensive Imageprint package yet, although many black-and-white photographers swear by it.
The Quadtone RIP's install is a bit painful, which is to be expected as it's based on GNU print. There's some sort of masochism endemic to the open-source community, whereby software is not supposed to be good if it isn't a bit painful to get to work. I guess the same crowd also expects medicine to be bitter if it's good for you.
For this RIP, a more comprehensive "Getting Started" guide would do marvels for the product's merchantability. Once I got the Quadtone thingy working, though, I got decent prints. What is remarkable is that the print really looks like my calibrated screen, as far as density goes.
It looks like this modestly priced shareware is a good solution for those with older Epson printers and no profiling equipment— the newest generation of Epsons are designed to make toned prints out of the box. I'm thinking of dumping my old Epson 2200 printer, but can't quite justify it.
I've seen that HP printers produce beautiful black and white, but I rubbed a bit of spittle across a salesroom demo print, and the ink ran— I guess you shouldn't sneeze if you're selling prints run off an HP machine.
Anyway, these monochrome inkjet renderings are nowhere as beautiful as prints from a wet process. Even though my buyers are happy, I'm not: I miss the deep blacks. And, I wonder, what's so attractive about my black-and-white inkjet work? Why does it sell?
Methinks the lack of color lends an in temporal quality to an image. In a way, black and white is the memory color of reminiscence, of the path traveled and left well behind. Did you say nostalgia?
For the time being I've declared a moratorium on frustration. My latest print in the gallery window is a color still life—in vibrant Epson Ultrachrome.
Clearly, the monochrome style will remain important for arty photographers. But I sure hope that someone will make a really good black-and-white and color printer, so that all the technical tricks listed above can fade away.
