Monochrome Printing

A number of you have told me of the difficulty you are having printing a neutral black and white image to present to the Monochrome Group. This is a problem I shared for over a decade. However, there are ways to minimise the problem.

The first, most obvious, decision would be to obtain a profile for your printer. Many paper manufactures or resellers will make a free custom profile for you and for the price of a couple of sheets of A4 it is well worth trying. Alas, in my experience, if your printer uses five or fewer cartridges it is unlikely that a printer profile will produce the desired effect for black and white, though it could well improve your colour prints.

Consumer printers are optimised for colour so the way out of this particular problem is to print coloured monochrome. This is equivalent to using the monochrome tones of old. Most editors will allow you to to print with digital emulations of the traditional dyes such as; cyanotype, selenium, light and dark sepia, copper etc.. The list is long and open to innovation. To get close to a black and white print using a colour printer I would suggest using selenium. Interestingly, Don McCullin’s book of landscape pictures is printed throughout in dark sepia.

The following images illustrate what can be achieved using colour monochrome.

Coffee

Dark Sepia

Cyanotype Copper

Selenium Ambrotype

As ‘Monochrome’ implies, any single colour may be used; my selection relates to traditional toning.

I hope this helps!

Best of luck with your printing.

Basil