The following is a posting on my WordPress blog from August 31, 2017
Ever since I was forced to print 13x19 b&w on my Canon printer, a whole new world has opened up for me.
Earlier this year I was informed that a local bank expressed an interest in a few of my Detroit architectural photographs for their art collection. A gallery I was once affiliated with was to be the broker for this sale.
My choices were to print them myself or farm them out. My other choices were to print wet or digitally. The 16x20 wet prints I would have to do myself since there wasn't and isn't any printers that I know of who print wet. I checked around for ink jet print labs and found one individual in Canton who seemed OK. (The largest paper size the Canon accepts is 13x19. The image size on 16x20 wet prints would have been about 12x18 with a wide white border. Image size on the Canon prints would have been 12x18 with a narrower border all around.)
But I decided to wet print the four negatives for one reason or another but mainly I realized it would be my opportunity to begin to use up a freezer full of gelatin silver paper. Paper that had been in there for 8,9, 10 years. I was curious to find out if the 50 sheet box of Agfa 16x20 matte paper was still "good" - hadn't fogged because of age.
I tested the paper and found it was good. Before I printed I wanted to give the Canon a chance to prove it's worth. Up to that point I was having trouble getting satisfactory b&w prints. I should say extreme trouble getting neutral prints without color casts of green, magenta, blue. Everything I tried in Photoshop to get the right combination matching paper to color management choices hadn't really worked up to that point printing my factory archives on 8.5x11 paper. Plus the four prints for the bank were to have a brownish/sepia tone to them. That's what the bank saw when they chose the photographs.
The digital prints were terrible. Blue color casts in the darker shades of gray and some magenta in lesser shades of gray. I left on a scheduled two week vacation during which I mulled over my problem. I returned and wet printed the first negative of "City Woman". I had to use a diffusion filter to throw off the sharpness but it also reduced the contrast considerably. But it was unsuccessful. I could not get the contrast up even while printing through the #5 contrast filter. (I realized later that I didn't really have to use the diffusion because the enlargement was so big that it softened the sharpness enough anyway).
In a panic I went back to the Canon and tried again. This time I was able to get the brownish/blackish tones to closely match one print to the other but still with the blueish/cyan cast in the darkest grays. I reasoned that the client wouldn't care or understand that the casts shouldn't be in there. I decided they would accept it. And apparently they did. I delivered the final prints to the gallery and I got the check payment in the mail a few weeks later. I have no idea how they look on the walls of the bank's offices or conference rooms.
Because of that experience I had a 50 sheet box of 13x19 Canon Matte paper with about 35-40 sheets left. It wasn't until this month - actually a couple of weeks ago and 2 months after delivery of the bank prints - that I tried a couple of 13x19 b&w prints on the Canon. In the interim I've gone back to printing the factory negs but still having problems getting a neutral b&w print without color casts. I was having some success until I stumbled on a combo that gave me completely color cast free prints. The combo consists of choosing Plain Paper in stead of Matte, gray scale in color management and color space.
The Canon has 6 ink cartridges; cyan, magenta, yellow, gray, photo black and an over-sized pigment black for printing text. Well, the settings above use more pigment black than anything else, especially the color inks. The resultant prints can look a little xeroxy before I adjust the tones. I'm not getting the full range of 256 shades from pure white to pure black. a lot of the mid-tone grays are dropped. But I'm having success adjusting the black densities and bringing back the grays. I really like what I'm getting - higher contrast with deep blacks, suppressing extraneous detail. Definitely not the Ansel Adams school of zoning.
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