Digital Photography Hacks

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 hack 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 ...