How to print a photo in black and white. Printing black and white photographs. Ink Tanks and Installing Them in the Printer

Ilford continues to talk about working with photographic film: this time we will learn how to print photographs.

We recently wrote about a video course on black and white film development from Ilford. Now the British photo producer has released another video - this time dedicated to printing black and white photographs. If you haven't done typing before, then this is a great introduction to the business. The video is in English, but below are all stages of the process.

The video is divided into 7 parts:

Part 1: List of Things To Do (00:08)

Before you start printing, you will need to find and collect everything you need, including a developing room (a room that can be made completely dark) with enough space to work, a photo enlarger with a lens, chemicals and a number of small consumables and tools (photo paper, a red lamp, tongs, thermometer, rubber gloves, and so on).

As for the reagents, you will need: a developer (to develop the image on photographic paper), stop solution (to stop the development process) and fixer (to fix the image). And also cuvettes for each of them.

Part 2: Preparing Reagents (01:28)

Then you need to prepare the reagents, calculating the correct amount of each, as well as water for the solution, depending on the size of the photographic paper and the cuvettes used.

Part 3: Choosing the negative (02:45)

Place the pieces of film on the light table and use the magnifying glass to select the frame you want to print. Then place the desired section in the holder to separate the desired photo.

Part 4: Focusing the Image (03:07)

Place the holder in the magnifier to project the image onto the projection table. Raise / lower the “head” of the magnifier to obtain the desired image size. Use the focusing mechanism of the magnifier and focusing lens for precise focusing.

Part 5: Aperture Selection (03:33)

Set the desired aperture on the magnifier lens (Ilford recommends starting at f / 8) and set the desired filter.

Part 6: Test Print (03:52)

Set the timer so that it goes off at short intervals (Ilford recommends 5 seconds). Expose a piece of photographic paper, covering the rest, then, after five seconds, slightly move the shutter - and so on until the entire sheet is ready.

Then the image needs to be developed, fixed and washed. This test print will show the result at different exposure times and help you choose the optimal one.

Part 7: Final Seal (05:26)

Expose the image for the time selected in step 6, then place the photo paper in a cuvette with a developer. Remove, place in the stop solution cuvette, then into the fixer cuvette, and finally rinse the finished photo. All that's left to do is dry it and your first printed photo is ready.

The art of photography has enjoyed great popularity at all times. Love for photography and its prevalence makes it close to works of art, and it is sometimes appreciated more than sculpture and photography.

The art of photography is not only the art of finding different landscapes and people that are worthy of the attention of photographers. It is also the work of people performing auxiliary work, who turn the moment of capturing a photo into a work of art that can be looked at for a very long time.

It is not enough to take a good picture, you need to print a photo of high quality.

Black and white photography is a real art

Professionals believe that color photography can only reflect the appearance and shape of an object, while a black-and-white photograph reflects the soul and real face of both a person and an object that served as a kind for photography.

Photo center PREMIUM prints high quality black-and-white photos on modern equipment produced by well-known companies.

Their specialists will print black-and-white photographs of any complexity in the shortest possible time, at a high professional level at affordable prices. Employees of the company are able to turn any photograph into almost a real masterpiece.

For those who urgently need photographs, they can offer "Urgent black-and-white photo printing" and the order will be carried out in the presence of the customer.

Photobook Printing

Graduation photos are the basis of the graduation album. Their photographers use professional Canon and Nikon techniques. All their specialists went through a large competition before cooperation. Customers can rest assured that they will receive unforgettable photos.

Before the photos are included in the photobook, they are retouched by a professional designer. He removes skin imperfections, performs retouching of clothes, if necessary, corrects the figure. Don't worry if you get a pimple or a cold, it won't interfere with the photo! Always be in a wonderful mood, and they will think about the details! If you decide to print a photobook, you will have the best gift, because they can print photobooks the best.

Graduation photos are no longer framed photographs. Nowadays, graduation albums are made in the form of a photobook. As the name suggests, this album resembles a real book: with hard laminated covers and pages and high quality paper. They offer 2 types of photo books: with printed pages and hard cover and plastic pages and hard cover.

The ability to print newspaper quality photographs has been around since the birth of personal computers. Dot matrix printers easily provided newspaper-quality printing, and laser printers provided the quality of a good art magazine. With the advent of color inkjet printers, there has been a breakthrough in printing color photographs. For a reasonable price, it became possible to obtain almost photographic quality. The question of comparing black-and-white photography and a black-and-white print did not even arise, the quality was incomparable. Over the past twenty years, black and white photography has ceased to be widespread and has turned into a purely professional one, in demand mainly by photographers. Today the cost of black and white film exceeds the cost of color, and finding a laboratory that develops and prints it has become almost a detective task. One could talk for a long time about the peculiarities of black and white photography and the unique possibilities that are inaccessible to its color sister. But this article is about technique, not art. I leave the art to the readers, but here I will try to tell you about the solution implemented by the company Lyson, which makes high-quality black and white printing available, which allows photographers involved in black and white photography to seriously think about the possibilities of using a computer in their work. I'll start with a picture taken under a microscope. At first glance, the right and left parts of the image look completely different. However, if we reduce the image every 100 times, we will see a dark gray line and a light gray field next to it, despite the fact that in one case this gray field was printed with Epson T008 color ink, and in the other - with Lyson gray ink.

The idea, implemented by Lyson, has been in the air for a long time. It is based on very simple considerations. If we want to display 256 shades of gray in a photo and at the same time we use ink whose droplets absorb 100% light, then in order to render a shade 1/256 of black, we will have to leave a place around one black point intact, in which 255 more such points could be set. That is, in the case of a regular raster, we can imagine an image consisting of squares of 16 by 16 pixels, where the grayscale will be determined by the number of black dots in this square. Now imagine that we have taken an ink that absorbs only 10% of the light falling on it. In this case, we can get 1/256 of black by typing one gray dot in a 5 by 5 dot box and leaving the rest untouched. If instead of colored ink we fill in gray inks of different densities, then we will be able to get smooth transitions in shades from annoying rare dots, i.e. such a photo can be viewed not only from afar, but also from a distance of the best vision of 25 cm.Of course, if you mix the colored dots, as in the photo above, you can get almost the same result, but, firstly, if you get closer to the photo and take a magnifying glass, the colored dots will still be noticeable, and secondly, the colored inks fade at different rates and in different ways, so the print, which was initially neutral gray, may eventually acquire a color tint. By combining different gray inks, you can get a much finer raster than when printing with only one black color, since there is no need to select a field for each point of the image, in which you can place 256 drops.

Thus, if the droplet size of the printer is 1/720 inch, then if the image has only 2 shades, black and white, then we can transmit 720 dots per 1 inch of the print. If we have a grayscale image with 256 shades of gray, then when printing with black ink alone on 1 inch of the print, we will be able to display only 45 dots of the image. In the case of 6 colors, when the ink of the minimum density absorbs 3.5% of the light incident on them, and the following densities are 7, 14, 28, 56 and 100%, respectively, all 256 gradations can be transmitted by varying the number of dots in a square with a side in 3 drops. Those. 240 dots of the original image can be transferred per inch of print. If the raster is irregular, this value can be even higher.

Ink tanks and their installation in the printer.

Let's consider how the ability to print in gray colors on a color Epson Stylus Photo 870 printer is implemented. Native Epson ink tanks are equipped with microcircuits that count the number of drops used for printing. Lyson ink tanks initially did not have microcircuits; it is proposed to insert microcircuits from old Epson cartridges into them, having previously reprogrammed them. For flashing microcircuits, a special programmer is used (judging by the inscriptions on the case, from ILRS or JET TEC), which is sold for about the price of 2 ink cartridges. The programmer kit is a blue box, 2 trays where microcircuits are inserted, and a plastic spatula for removing microcircuits from the cartridge.

The programmer is non-separable, inside it is a 9-volt E23A battery, which theoretically should be enough for the rest of your life. We could not resist and broke the programmer, so you can see its stuffing in the photo.

The reprogramming process is extremely simple. You remove the microcircuits from the cartridge, insert them into the tray, and slide the tray into the programmer.

At the same time, the LED turns on, which, when programming is completed, will start blinking at a rate of 1 frame per second. Reprogramming is performed quite correctly, not only the number of consumed ink is reset to zero, but the record indicating the ink manufacturer from EPSON to ILRS is also changed.

Therefore, after installing the cartridge in the printer, the latter reports that a non-native ink is installed, and offers a choice of whether to continue or stop working.

The engineers who developed this programmer use a circular contact pad on the microcircuit to turn it on. This achieves maximum ease of use and savings on the switch.

But, as it turns out, they were saving in vain. Because Epson has changed the shape of the contact pads installed in the latest series of cartridges that are currently on the market.

In general, if you have microcircuits from cartridges of the first releases, then everything is in order, a pair of microcircuits will be enough for you to fully work, perhaps forever. If you only have modern microcircuits, then the programmer will have to be deceived. To do this, I used a piece of gum packaging with one-sided foil coating. Wrapping it around the tray, I inserted the microcircuit into the programmer. The LED lit up and after a while blinked frequently, often. In general, the mode is abnormal, but, as it turned out, we completed our task, the ink consumption was reset to zero. True, Epson remained the manufacturer of the inkwell.

In conclusion, I note that the system does not care which cartridge you took the microcircuit from, color or black. I used two chips from color cartridges, one of which I put in a cartridge with 5 gray dyes, and the other in a black cartridge from Lyson. In the information about ink in the printer menu, a message appeared that 2 color cartridges T008 were installed, however, this did not affect further work in any way.

Test results.

Lyson QuadBlack Neutral ink tested.

By the color of the lines in the nozzle cleanliness test, we will compare the procedure for replacing colored ink with gray ink and evaluate their density.

No difference was found between the density of gray ink sprayed from the light cyan and light magenta ink nozzles. The variation in the whiteness of the paper exceeds the difference in the density of the ink, if, of course, there is one.

Let us compare the system for converting a color image to grayscale in Photoshop and Epson drivers with the grayscale obtained when printing a color table with Lyson ink.

Let's evaluate the change in the density of the print of a linear gradient fill made in the Corel Draw program.

After scanning, QuadBlack Neutral inks are perceived to be warmer than the original print. The tone of the print varies greatly with the paper. In my experiments, the print hue was almost neutral on matte LOMOND paper and substantially warm on Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper.

Note that if we print colored fills with additional colors, then we get a different contrast. Thus, it becomes possible to change the contrast of the print by varying the composition of the ink involved in its creation.

To check the resolution when printing grayscale images, I printed a radial world with half of its strokes having sharp edges and applying a Gaussian Blur filter to the rest. The original image had a resolution of 720 dpi. Printing was carried out in 1440 dpi mode. Scanning was carried out with a resolution of 300 dpi. Curves are plotted for the scanned image and the original image reduced to 300 dpi. The world contains 90 black strokes. The radius of the red circle is 70 pixels, its length is 440 pixels, and on the print it is 1.46 inches long, i.e. there are 123 black and white lines in the original image per inch of print. One can not only clearly distinguish between their existence, but also notice changes in their density across the width.

Let's compare a picture of the world taken with a digital camera and its scanned print. Resolution 300 dpi. As you can see, virtually all the details have been preserved, although the MTF has changed significantly.

Let's compare fragments of the original file, a print from this file on standard photo paper using Gretag Net Printer 812, and fragments of a print in Lyson ink on LOMOND paper. Visually, the original photograph looks preferable, although it is impossible to say that this better perception is associated specifically with one or another detail that is lost in the printer print. The micro-contrast of the original is probably essential. As for a photo print taken from a computer file, it looks very believable, but excessive contrast is noticeable. This resulted in the loss of detail, which, however, is reproduced when printed on an inkjet printer.

The print on the Epson Stylus Photo 870 printer in Lyson QuadBlack Neutral ink.

A print from a file on photo paper.

Finally, an example of a print of a "high key" photograph.

Scanned at 300 dpi.

A high key means no heavy shadows at all. Ideally, such an image should be generally shadowless, only with individual black "strokes".

The Lyson brand specializes in the production of lightfast inks and papers. A protective Print Guard varnish is also available for application to the finished print and protection against smudging and fading. In addition to the tested QuadBlack with a neutral hue, there are similar inks that have a warm or cool hue. Low-tinted Small Gamut inks are also available to produce a tinted print. There are kits for Epson and Canon printers.

The company also manufactures color inks: Fotonic - for color printing of photographs, Lysonic - for printing color art graphics.