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 balance? all these terms come directly from analog photography.
This idea 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 right? you 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.
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.

Source: O'Reilley | Portfolio Website | Online Portfolio

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  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...

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