![]() Note that production inkjet presses sometimes used to print books use CMYK and do not have the ink options of desktop printers like the 3880 or some wide-format inkjet printers. Using different settings on the printer driver, a monochrome photograph can be printed in many different ways, one of them using photo black plus the two grays (a tritone). ![]() ![]() This printer uses nine inks, including four different blacks: photo black, matte black, light black, and light light black. The tritone technique can also be used on some high-quality inkjet printers, like my Epson 3880. Consequently, for printing black-and-white images using process colors, the non-black colors are kept out of the midtones and highlights, either by editing the CMY curves in Photoshop or by using an ICC printing profile that suppresses them. A light gray, for example, is almost impossible to reproduce neutrally and is usually shifted toward the cyan or magenta. On both offset and digital presses, the light-midtones and highlight areas of images are extremely susceptible to the slightest variation in density of cyan and magenta. Only black is allowed in the midtones and highlight areas of the image, because CM and Y can cause very visible color shifts away from a neutral gray. Print the black and white images using the process colors (CMYK), boosting the density of shadow areas of the print by adding in cyan or magenta.A tritone uses three ink colors, a quadtone four, etc. The duotone process, which uses two ink colors-black plus a gray-to increase the density of shadows and the overall dynamic range of the image.In offset printing, the solution to this is to use additional impressions of ink to boost the density of the shadow (darkest) areas of the image. Given this translucency, black and white photographs printed just in black ink can appear washed out, without the full dynamic range visible in a silver print or on screen. Backgroundīecause offset press inks are translucent, black is never really black, but a dark gray. But what about digital printing? I wanted to know the best way to print a black and white photo book, so I did some tests. In the world of offset printing, the route to the highest quality black-and-white printing is pretty clear: print the images as duotones (black ink plus one or more gray inks) or as 4-color process.
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