From the course: Inkjet Printing for Photographers

Discussing considerations for black and white - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Inkjet Printing for Photographers

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Discussing considerations for black and white

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So all inkjet printers are going to do color, but if you want the option to do black and white, you've got to be really careful about what you buy. The tricky thing about black and white, and what this printer does really well, is that black and white can come out of the printer not actually looking truly neutral. We've been talking a lot about how you've got to have real black and you've got to have real white. You also want gray that's actually gray. And I don't know if you saw earlier, because of the lighting that we had in here, these black-and-white prints actually look kind of green. We've now gotten the lights fixed so that they do on truly neutral. Not every printer can do this, and what I mean by truly neutral is this gray right here really does look gray. It doesn't have a slight green or magenta cast. It doesn't look too warm. It doesn't look too cool. That's a really hard thing to pull off. We didn't have inkjet printing technology that can do that until about 10 years ago, maybe eight or 10 years ago. So I think by this point you guys are really into black-and-white printing; everybody has been doing a little bit of it. So that's another critical consideration when you are printer shopping is you want to get a printer that can do a truly neutral black-and-white print. And again, that's a function of the ink set that's in here. We've got three different blacks to work with, so they can get all these fine shades of gray, and they done a very meticulous job of making sure that when the black-and-white print comes out it doesn't shift tone as you move from one type of light to another. It also doesn't bronze, which means that different areas don't take on this kind of bronze look as you shift it around in light. When printing on glossy paper with this printer we don't get something called gloss differential, which means that black areas have a different level of glossiness than other areas. So if you're serious about black and white, before you buy any particular printer you want to look up reviews and things like that and see if the printer is actually good at black-and-white output. Any questions?

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