By Marc Aguilera 
Making black-and-white prints seems to be more popular than ever before.The only difference is that instead of using a darkroom full of enlargers, negatives and chemistry, we work in digital "darkrooms" that consist of a computer, monitor, software and a digital printer.
Just how popular has black-and-white photography become? Flickr alone has over 46,000 individual groups about black-and-white images, with well into millions of images. And visit hotels and restuarants in major cities and you'll see many black-and-white photos decorating the walls.
Thanks to ongoing advances in editing software and printers, it has become increasingly easy to convert any color image into a black-and-white print and achieve stunning results. You can also scan black-and-white negatives and transparencies and manipulate curves to essentially do what film photographers once did in the darkroom with filters.
There are a variety of ways to create black-and-white images in Photoshop. You can also use some print drivers, RIP software, or third-party tools as well. Personally, I have become very fond of Nik Software's Silver Efex Pro, which operates as a Plug-In for Photoshop. The user interface is straightforward and Silver Efex will convert any digital image either into a black-and-white image or color-toned images that mimics traditional processes such as Ambrotypes or "Pinhole" effects.
Fig-1 below shows a digital image that I shot as a JPG with my Nikon D200. From there I started Silver Efex Pro as a "Filter" which brought up the user interface in Fig 2, 3, and 4.
Figs 1 and 2
Figs 3 and 4
Printing neutral black-and-white images used to be a big challenge, requiring photographers to spend countless hours trying to eliminate unwanted color casts that resulted simply from using cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks to create shades of gray and black. Today, printers such as my Designjet Z3200 can easily produce perfectly neutral even-toned black and white prints.
The HP Designjet uses a quad-black ink system with Photo Black, Matte Black, Medium Gray, and Light Gray inks and a driver that separates RGB files into the appropriate channels for neutral black-and-white printing. The only real manipulation you have to do involves tone shape and shadow-midtone-highlight detail, Achieving neutrality is left up to the firmware built into the Z3200.
In my Google search of black-and-white digital printing, I didn't get nearly as many results as I thought I would. It seems most posts where written in the past when the technology was more challenging and the results were unsatisfactory. This is a sign of great progress! It probably indicates that more photographers are using newer-model printers such as the Designjet Z3200 which have removed a lot of the frustration associated with trying to make neutral blacks with the six-color CMYKLcLm inksets used on older models such as the HP Designjet 5500 or Designjet 130.
Now that black-and-white imaging has become easier, do you think it will become even more popular than it is today? I have my own thoughts on why black-and-white images can be so powerful. But I want to hear what you think. Why do you like producing black-and-white images? What methods do you use most often to convert your color shots into black-and-white prints?
Posted
04-10-2009 7:06 PM
by
Eileen Fritsch