Despite the advent of color printing, for many artists and photographers, a high quality black and white image is still the preferred output medium for their fine art work. Classically, the highest quality black and white photography books are printed using offset presses equipped with
multiple gray inks for rich, smooth and detailed prints. Similar quality is difficult to achieve on modern digital presses, where the output production is typically limited to a standard 4-color (CMYK) ink set. HP Indigo digital presses have the ability to print with up to 7 different inks.
While the typical use of the additional 3 channels is for custom colorants deployed in spot color applications, they also have the potential to be deployed for fine art black and white printing using multiple gray inks similar to those deployed in conventional offset presses. Such custom,
black and white ink based workflows, deployed on digital presses, have the added advantage of being able to print short-run productions which are very desirable in limited-edition, fine art reproduction applications. This paper summarizes some general results of experiments performed at
HP Labs, along with
Kok-Wei Koh, Nitin Sampat, "Investigation of Workflows for High Quality, Fine Art Black & White, Digital Publishing" in Proc. Int'l Symp.on Technologies for Digital Photo Fulfillment, 2009, pp 44 - 47, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4672.2009.2.0.44