Digital Prints

And finally, “familiarity with darkroom ways and unfamiliarity with the computer tools
necessary for a digital workflow is another fear,” says fine art photographer and consultant
Robert Morrison. A different set of skills is definitely required, and this creates resistance
to change.
Getting Results with Digital Black and White
Acknowledging that this book can only be a snapshot in time as technology evolves, here
are some equipment, supplies, and workflow choices to get you on the road to great digital
black and white.
Image Capture
While you could certainly use a high-end digital camera or scanning back, many digital
black-and-white pros shoot film and then scan it.
“Start with a well-cared-for black-and-white negative that is carefully scanned,” says Los
Angeles photographer and printmaker Antonis Ricos, who, with fine-art photographer
Martin Wesley, runs one of the most important e-mail discussion lists for digital black-andwhite
pros (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint). “For large
prints and 8 × 10 negs, drum scanner technology may still have significant advantages over
a CCD, depending on the neg and the size of the final print. Scanning at resolutions beyond
what the best CCDs offer and doing so with a single, focused point of light extracts more
accurate information from certain originals like large format or high-contrast negs. Drum
scanning is also able to keep any film (especially 35mm) flatter and therefore sharper than
other scanners. However, for formats up to 4 × 5, you can get very decent results with the
Imacon scanners, especially the latest models that offer autofocus and a cooled CCD.”
Converting Color and Printing Monochrome
If you’re starting from a color capture or scan, there are numerous ways of converting color
images to monochrome for digital black-and-white printing, and Adobe Photoshop is the
preferred software to do it. (There are some excellent Photoshop plug-ins for even more
sophisticated conversions of color to black-and-white, too.) “Photoshop is the industry
standard for image editing and with good reason,” says black-and-white, fine-art photographer
Amadou Diallo. Rarely a week goes by that I don’t stop and say ‘Wow’ at the level
of precision and control it affords. Because of its widespread use, Photoshop also provides
a common language among imagers. I can talk about shadow values, gamma densities,
and ink percentages with another photographer, and we’re actually talking about the
same numbers.”
RGB > Grayscale
It’s easy to convert a color image to a monochromatic grayscale in Photoshop (Image >
Mode > Grayscale), but how you print this neutral image makes all the difference.
Print Grayscale with Black Ink Only: Most inkjet printer drivers give you a choice of
“color” or “black” ink when printing (see Figure 11.5). Selecting the black-ink-only option
might seem like a good way to print a monochrome image, but there are drawbacks. With
the exception of newer printers using the smallest dot sizes, the prints sometimes lack detail
Chapter 11 ■ Special Printing Techniques 349