Many black & white photographers are familiar with Lenswork magazine, the excellent fine art black & white magazine that is known for its superb quality of printing. Founder Brooks Jensen has started a number of promising blogs associated with the magazine, and I wanted to highlight two recent postings that might be of interest to many fine art photographers and printers.
One thing Lenswork is also known for is its consistent warm, brown look for its black & white imagery. Lenswork uses a duotone printing process and Brooks has an interesting discussion of why they use such a process instead of a more traditional quadtone CMYK printer on his new blog. Many people have tried to replicate that look (which originates from the duotone printing process and their choice of inks) but Brooks has posted his own personal attempt to do so in a format suitable for both Lightroom and Photoshop at the bottom of that article. I tried out the Photoshop version (a Black & White adjustment layer that you ‘load’ as part of a new adjustment layer) and I’d say it is a pretty close match, as you can see in the image below:
I don’t think that one should blindly follow the settings of others, but this should be a good starting point if you are a fan of the tone of Lenswork. Each printer and paper will also have an impact on any final printed images, and to use this particular conversion you will have to print the image as a color image using Photoshop.
If you use an Epson printer with its Advanced Black & White mode (which I find to be superior to printing a black & white image, even toned, as a color image), you can also use Brooks’ ABW settings as a starting point for your own printing. I haven’t tried to print using these settings but I look forward to testing them out. Achieving a satisfying tone and color on a fine art digital black & white print is often difficult to achieve, but the tools to do so are quite powerful (and complex) and having a good starting point for the look you are trying to achieve can result in significant savings in time, ink, and paper.
