Hi Sebastian, yes, B&W is way harder to get right than color, but this requires a back story.
I’m shooting since I was 11, started out on film, became a Nikon guy, and was an early adapter for digital, first aps-c, then full frame, had a good job and was able to afford decent gear, but then I got bored. Things were too easy and too perfect: The sterile clinical look of high-end modern optics on ever-more-perfect sensors. At the same time, photography was still a lonely hobby. So I decided three things:
1. Go back to film, mainly B&W so I could easily do my own development and scanning.
2. Optimize development and scanning of 35mm using my physics background to the point that it could compete with MF, so I could keep my gear compact. 35mm is capable of 100+ line-pairs per mm (~100 MPix) if done well. The limitation is digitization.
3. To make photography more social: Specialize in portrait photography, learning through model photography, with the goal to be able to grab any stranger off the street and create a great “art” portrait within 5 minutes.
I had this very specific look in my inner eye that I pursued for at least three years. It meant using 1950’s Sonnar-type optics (now finally gave in and have a 1957 Leica as my main camera…) and trying out all available B&W films in my search for the tonality and rendering that I was after. Eventually I landed on Kodak double x cinema film that needs to be re-spooled for 35mm still photography. All this was no easy task and many of my adventures can be read on my blog (
https://www.arnogodeke.com/Blog).
So after some years, a steep learning curve, purchasing and selling a lot of old film camera gear, and building nearly an optical lab in my home, I am very close to finally achieving the raw but technically perfect, and with great rendering and tonality, look that I was after.
So now I have a portfolio that so far lives in the digital domain only with the goal to create the end product: Large printed B&W pictures that correctly render the look and tonal ranges that I fought to get over all these years. The final goal is to present my “art” in an exhibition somewhere. For this, I need good B&W prints with settings that I can control myself. Hence, my quest to dive into printer calibration.
I dabbled with QuadtoneRIP, thinking that I could create neutral B&W prints when I would only use a black ink cartridge, but to print light grey, one obviously (with hindsight) will get pixelated highlights, not representing the smooth tonal ranges that I pursued so hard in the negatives. One route is to replace all the color cartridges with various grey inks, but this means giving up on color, or buying a used multi-ink printer to dedicate to B&W only. The second route is to get colors so well calibrated that they can be mixed in to create smooth tonal ranges in the highlights, but this requires indeed very accurate profiling to not create color casts. Hence, I’m here, learning about ChromIQ.
Today I tried creating patches all around neutral grey, thinking color would not be relevant, but the resulting profiles don’t work: Huge color casts and they depend on brightness, so my initial theory of profiling only B&W and forgetting about color doesn’t work: Accurate and neutral B&W with a color printer requires actually all the colors to be accurate as well.
One thing I noticed today is that initially I couldn’t get a good profile, because close to half of the patches were far from what they should be (huge delta E). I suspect now that using a hairdryer to speed things up wasn’t a good idea, but maybe it’s a glitch when spreading patches over multiple pages. I don’t know yet. Eventually, I rescanned multiple lines on an A4 and got a profile which was stated “excellent”. With that, I printed a B&W shot that originated from cinema film and my jaw dropped when I saw the tonal ranges that came out of the printer. So it worked in the end, and far surpassed anything I had seen printed in B&W before, including prints from some well-respected experts.
In short: ChromIQ works and gets me and my trusty old Epson R1900 color printer to a B&W print quality that I could have only dreamed of.
With respect to shooting digital colors and converting that to B&W: It is indeed hard to edit properly, and in no way it can approach even remotely what can be done when starting out with B&W (cinema) film and optimized scanning. The tonality, rendering, and look can simply not be replicated with a digital camera. I feel that I’m now approaching analog enlargements as used to be done by folks who have decades of experience in darkrooms. I have a friend who has worked in a high end analog lab in Paris for most of his career and together we’re pursuing the quest to get inkjet prints that approach that analog level. ChromIQ seems an enabling tool, seemingly enabling, or perhaps even surpassing, but at least approaching, on a color printer what QuadtoneRIP does for dedicated B&W printers. Well done!
As to differences between iPhone screens and computer monitors: I assume that you calibrated your monitor with your colormunki and set it at around 120 candella (? I think that was the unit) fixed brightness? A phone screen, although perhaps good, is not calibrated and changes brightness depending on environment. In my experience, color is indeed more forgiving in looking “okay or good enough” than B&W, which much more depends on accuracy of tonal distribution (it’s the only thing that makes the picture).
Just my few cents.
Arno
