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Educate me about printing B&W images…
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…and I’m not talking inkjets or budget PC/Mac home printers.
I’ll soon want to print some pictures and I want the best possible results – as I hope to exhibit sometime this year. The big problem is I have no knowledge when it comes to printing photos – in particular black and white images.
Also, there may quite a few duotoned black and white images for printing – so essentially these will be full colour CMYK images.
Where would be the best places (Belfast, County Down/Co. Armagh areas if known) to get professionally printed photos? Any thing else I shoud know that I haven’t asked?
Thanks in advance for your tips.
I’m almost certain that the very best monochrome images are in fact printed on inkjet printers. Not just any old inkjet printers of course, but top end printers with correct paper profiles for the paper you wish to print on. From what I’ve seen so far, inkjet images produce a better quality image than RA4 prints when it comes to fine-art work. But it does require a lot of time and effort to get to that quality level. Maybe prints from a Durst Lambda printer or a Kodak Pegasus printer will excel, I don’t know. Inkjets generally have a wider gamut than RA4 printers. I’m going to watch this thread with interest because it’s something I want to do as well, in the longer term.
I’m curious as to the very specific reference to CMYK. Are these going to be published in a book or magazine or is your workflow in CMYK as opposed to RGB?
Well I did manage to find out that Silver Gelatin Print actually isn’t anything fancy – as all black and white printing involves silver.
This term was introduced and became popular to make it sound like a specifically interesting technique. It was used to make the photo/s sound more interesting in exhibitions etc.In much the same way, Gicl?e printing is a fancy term given to inkjet printing.
Incidentally, it’s not strictly true that all black and white printing involves silver. Most labs these days will probably use the RA4 process I referred to above, even for black and white printing.
Luda wrote:
Well I did manage to find out that Silver Gelatin Print actually isn’t anything fancy – as all black and white printing involves silver.
This term was introduced and became popular to make it sound like a specifically interesting technique. It was used to make the photo/s sound more interesting in exhibitions etc.I think you might need to try to find out a bit more-
unless you’re happy to leave it at that-Incidentally, the term refers to silver halide crystals suspended in a gelatin emulsion, and coated onto paper, or some other substrate
then usually exposed optically, and usually hand printed and processed,
then sometimes toned, sometimes glazed…
The emulsion becomes soft when wet, and is easily damaged-Or you could choose to print on resin coated paper-
an emulsion encapsulated in plastic-
and much more hardy, though lacking the depth and Archival qualities of a fibre print-j
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