Do your best BW inkjets matched or surpass your best BW wet prints?

[John Bowen]

I hate forum posts that primarily attempt to bring clicks to someone's blog.. but to the uninitiated about some of the issues of fine B&W ink prints.. some of you may slog through this-

http://tylerboley.com/hahnemuhle-mus...nd-evaluation/

It touches on many of the issues involved with B&W ink work, paper selection and why, etc., even if the particulars might not be relevant to most.
So you still think we just hit the "print" button?

Tyler,

After many years of denial, I'm currently dipping my toes into the world of digital B&W. I found your blog post most informative. Thanks. Can you recommend a good book that would assist a newbie in "getting where he needs to go" in regards to the B&W digital workflow? I'm thinking about something like Fred Picker's Zone VI Workshop for B&W Digital.

If there's one thing I've learned from nearly 40 years in analog photography it's get the mechanical part of photography down so you can concentrate on "where to point the camera."

Many thanks,
John

[Tyler Boley]

I must say right off the bat that the hoops I jump through and tools I use are not for everyone, so that post implies a lot of tasks many won't have to deal with. I'm afraid I know of know great books dedicated to this kind of work. Amadou Diallo's "Mastering Digital Black and White" was generally good, but software, hardware, papers and inks have evolved since then, and it's more informational than actual teaching.
If you treat scanning as a separate issue, which it really is, you can find good info on that alone, including this forum. Following that are Photoshop skills, and then the more difficult part of printers, inksets, papers... Many don't purchase Photoshop any more, and just use Lightroom even for scans..
A Cone system is pretty much plug and play with the info provided, but scanning and file prep all comes before that. Other B&W output systems may take a little more info gathering, even the OEM options are less than immediately graspable, with ongoing color management issues. Unfortunately B&W has become marginalized amongst the providers of our tools, so it all will require some effort. But the darkroom did to.
Each one of these things is a learning phase, maybe something like one of Jeff Schewe's books to start, then focus on B&W specifically when comfortable with the basics. Wish I could say more, in my opinion the state of education available for state of the art B&W is pretty dismal.
I guess I like workshops and classes if affordable, hands on learning in a concentrated period of time with others works well.
Tyler

[John Bowen]

Thanks, Tyler