Piezography Quadtone Printmaking and the Future of Black-and-White Photography: One Man's View

George DeWolfe, Contributing Editor
ViewCamera Magazine
published in the july/august 2001 issue - pages 58-59

Quadtone Inkjet Printing is less than 3 years old. In that time we have come from crude software and less than archival dyebased inksets to a consistent driver and a high quality and permanent pigment-based ink solution. This solution uses Epson inkjet printers and high quality third party media. The result of research, cooperation, and constant iteration between manufacturers and individuals has built a solid and ongoing coalition. The efforts of Epson, Cone Editions, Legion Paper and the Camera Arts research group have literally changed the way we will do Black & White printing. The Cone Editions PiezographyBW for the Epson Stylus Color 3000 and other Epson printers represents a watershed from traditional to digital printmaking. With the new EPSON 7000 and PiezographyPro 24, we have the first black-and-white 16-bit RIP for inkjet printing. The result is a Black &White digital print that is aesthetically beautiful and archival.

The Quadtone Printing process has been around for years in the offset printing industry. Four different printing plates are run in succession much like the four color CMYK process, except that all the colors are changed to four different tones and densities of black. The combination of scanned high quality Black and White negatives and prints, a dependable printer,a high resolution printer driver, the PiezographyBW Quadtone inkset, and archival papers have enabled us to produce prints from an inkjet printer of higher quality than we traditionally produced with silver and platinum media. The Quadtone Print produces a quality that preserves the light and tonal values of the subject in a more efficacious way than traditional prints. The image somehow looks more real.

I first met Jon Cone, President of Cone Editions, at a New York trade show several years ago. At his booth he had displayed some beautiful warm-toned B&W prints. “Nice Platinum prints,” I remarked. “They’re not Platinum, they’re digital,” he said. At close examination I was amazed to see that there were no telltale inkjet printer dots in the high values, and the prints were continuous tone like a traditional B&W image. He told me these were his newly invented DigitalPlatinum for IRIS prints and that he was developing a similar process for the Epson 3000 inkjet printer.“I have a 3000,” I said. “Do you take Master Card and Visa?” Six months later, and after much email and telephone exchange, I was one of the first to get this new Quadtone inkset, driver, and profiles. The first print was so good that I said to my son,“Luc, we’ve got to phone this one in.”

Scientists and artists have long searched for a re- placement for silver in photographic images. Silver is a precious metal and hence not inexhaustible as a source for photography. Kodak, in the 1970’s, experimented with iron salts, but the real answer came with the introduction of digital imaging. I saw my first digital image at PMA in 1984 and it wasterrible. With advances in computers, however, over the next 6-10 years, and with the introduction of Adobe Photoshop, digital imaging came of age, first in the printing industry, and then to photography. The Iris printer was introduced in the early 1980’s, but was far too expensive for most photographers. By the mid-late1990’s Epson had produced the 3000 inkjet printer and the radically new Epson Photo Stylus line of 6-color printers. But there were still major problems. Visible highlight dots, jumpy B&W values, archival considerations, poor monitor calibration, lack of good profiling, and a scarcity of quality substrates continued to vex digital printmakers up until 1998. Jon Cone's introduction of Piezography BW fixed all of these problems except one -high quality digitally sized paper.

With the introduction of Piezography®BW, Cone sought a complete and radical solution to quality B&W printing. He insisted on a calibrated monitor achieved through the now famous Color Blind Prove It!, and invented a new driver that exported from Photoshop bypassing the Epson driver ’s highlight dots and increased the resolution from 720dpi to 2160dpi instantly. In addition, he profiled the carbon pigment Quadtone inkset with various new high quality papers so that the result was nearly flawless, with no curve adjustments that digital printmakers had to perform up until PiezographyBW. With these controls, and the dot gain settings in Photoshop, photographers now have control over tonal values from 0-100%: Complete control.

Cone Editions' Piezography is revolutionary and has, overnight, changed the history of photography. It is the answer to traditional photography’s toxic chemical heritage and is environmentally safe and sustainable. The print is as aesthetically beautiful as silver, and as archival. The control in the “lightroom” over tonal values is light-years beyond what we ever had in the “darkroom.”

The new EPSON 7000, combined with the Piezography system of Quadtone Printmaking, allows us to make 24x30 (and longer) black and white prints that are utterly dazzling. With the large-format camera (4x5 and greater) the detail, resolution, and tonal control at 16bits (16,000 grays rather than the typical 8-bit inkjet printer with 256 grays) destroys barriers once known in the darkroom to be unsolvable. Items such as lens aberrations and critical focus show up clearly with this process, making it paramount for the photographer to use the highest quality cameras, scanners, lenses, film, and techniques. Piezography with the 7000 pushes us beyond what we have known as the best in black-and-white photography.

I have been a B&W photographer for over 35 years. I studied with Ansel Adams and Minor White, and I know what a beautiful print is. Cone Edition’s Piezography has changed the way I work, and it has changed the way I see. It has allowed me to expand my vision into subtle tonalities I didn’t know existed, thus changing the way I look at the light and, in altering this, changes the shape and motion of the subject photographed, delineating the spirit of the image. If Ansel were alive, he ’d be into this bigtime.