Black and White Printing: Neutral Tones, Paper and Proofing

A good black and white print has truly neutral greys (or a tone you chose on purpose), deep blacks that still hold shadow detail, and clean whites that come from the paper itself. Getting there is harder than printing colour, because any colour cast shows immediately in a grey and because paper and light change how the tones read. The reliable route is a monochrome print mode or a lab that prints true black and white, a paper chosen for its black and white, a printed step wedge to find your limits, and soft proofing checked under decent light.

Why black and white prints are harder than colour

In a colour print, a slight shift towards warm or cool usually disappears into the image. A sunset that is a touch more orange still looks like a sunset. In a monochrome print there is nowhere for that shift to hide. Every tone is supposed to be grey, so a faint green or magenta tint is the first thing a viewer notices, especially in large smooth areas like skies, fog and walls.

There are three specific reasons this happens:

• Grey is built from colour. A printer running an ordinary colour profile makes most greys by mixing cyan, magenta and yellow with some black. If the balance between those inks is slightly off, the grey is tinted.
• The tint can change with the tone. Shadows might come out slightly warm while highlights lean cool. This colour crossover is especially distracting because it looks like two different prints stitched together.
• Metamerism. Two greys made from different ink mixtures can match under one light and separate under another. A print that looks neutral next to a daylight window can look greenish or pinkish under warm household bulbs. The effect is strongest when the grey relies on a mix of colour inks, and weakest when it is made mostly from black and grey inks.

Two ways a printer makes grey

Whether you print at home or use a lab, your greys are made in one of two basic ways, and the difference matters more than any other choice on this page.

If your printer has black and at least one grey ink, it probably offers a monochrome mode in its driver. Use it for black and white work. If it does not, you can still get good results through the colour path, but you will need the right paper profile and some test prints to find and correct any tint. When choosing a lab, ask directly whether they print black and white with a neutral grey process, on true black and white paper, or through their normal colour workflow.

One file detail matters on the colour path: a black and white image saved as an RGB file should have equal red, green and blue values in every pixel if you want it neutral. Sample a few tones with your editor’s colour sampler before you print; if a grey reads 120, 118, 124, the tint is already in the file, not the printer. The page on RGB colour explains how to read those numbers.

Neutral or toned: choosing the colour of your greys

A black and white print does not have to be dead neutral. Traditional darkroom printers used chemical toners to change the colour of the image, and those looks still work well today. The key is that the tone should be a decision, applied evenly, rather than an accident.

• Neutral. The safest and most versatile. Suits architecture, graphic street work and anything where you want the viewer to see pure form and contrast.
• Warm. A slight brown or cream tone that feels soft and inviting. Suits portraits, interiors and nostalgic subjects. Pairs naturally with a warm, natural-white paper.
• Cool. A slight blue-grey that feels crisp and clean. Suits snow, water, fog and modern architecture. Pairs well with brighter white papers.
• Sepia. A strong yellow-brown historically made by sulfide toning. Distinctive and period-looking, easy to overdo.
• Selenium-style. In the darkroom, selenium toner deepened the blacks and could shift the shadows slightly towards purple-brown while leaving highlights nearly neutral. Digitally, you get a similar effect by adding a very small cool or purple tint to the shadows only.

Keep toning subtle. On screen, a strong tone can look attractive, but on paper it often looks like a mistake. A useful rule: tone until you can see it, then reduce it by half. You can set the tone with your printer’s monochrome controls or in your editor, for example with split toning that adds one colour to shadows and another to highlights. Do not do both at once, or they will compound.

Choosing paper for black and white prints

Paper affects three things in a monochrome print: how deep the black can go, how white the white is, and how the surface catches light. Those three together decide how much tonal range the print can actually show.

Baryta papers are named after the layer of barium sulfate traditionally coated onto the base of darkroom fibre papers. Inkjet versions imitate that surface and are popular for black and white work because they combine very dark blacks with a subtle, non-plastic sheen.

If you are not sure, start with one lustre paper and one matte paper and print the same image on both. The difference is often obvious: dramatic, contrasty images usually want the deeper black of lustre or baryta, while soft, misty images can look lovely on matte. For how these compare with other surfaces, see canvas prints vs photo paper.

Paper white, natural white and optical brighteners

The whitest tone a print can show is the bare paper. Nothing brighter is possible, so the colour of the paper base sets the colour of your highlights and influences how every other tone reads.

Papers come in roughly two families. Bright white papers look crisp and cool. Natural white papers, sometimes described as warm white or cream, look softer and more traditional. A neutral image printed on natural white paper will look slightly warm overall; that can be exactly right for a portrait and slightly off for a snow scene.

Many bright white papers get part of their whiteness from optical brightening agents. These chemicals absorb ultraviolet light and re-emit it as visible blue light, which makes the paper look whiter than it really is. Two consequences follow:

• The paper looks different depending on how much ultraviolet is in the light. Under daylight it looks very white; under typical indoor lighting, or behind glass that filters ultraviolet, the effect is weaker and the paper looks less bright.
• Brighteners can lose their effect over time, so the paper base may drift towards its natural, warmer colour.

For prints meant to last, or for work where a neutral base matters, many printers prefer papers with few or no brighteners and accept a slightly warmer white.

Deep blacks and holding shadow detail

A screen can show a very wide range from black to white. A print cannot. Paper reflects light, and even the densest ink leaves a little of it reflecting back. The darkest tone a paper and ink combination can reach is called its maximum density, or black point. A black with a density of 2.0 reflects only about 1 percent of the light that falls on it, roughly a hundred times darker than bare paper. Glossy and baryta papers get closest to that; matte papers usually fall noticeably short, which is why their blacks look softer.

Two things go wrong in the shadows:

• Blocked shadows. The last several steps above black in your file all print as the same solid black, so dark detail such as a coat, foliage or rock texture disappears.
• Weak blacks. On a paper with a shallow black point, the deepest tones look grey and muddy, and the whole print loses punch.

Your job is to fit the image’s tonal range to what the paper can reproduce. Choose a paper with a deep enough black for the image, then make sure the tones you care about in the shadows sit above the point where the printer runs out of separation. A soft proof shows you a simulation of this; a step wedge shows you the truth for your exact combination. Setting a clean black and white point in the file, as described in setting black and white points, is the starting point, and a gentle adjustment with the tone curve does the fine fitting.

Make a step wedge before your first real print

A step wedge is a strip of grey patches from black to white in equal steps. Printing one on each paper you use tells you exactly where your shadows block up, where your highlights disappear into paper white, and whether the greys are neutral. It takes a few minutes and saves many wasted sheets.

1. Build the file. In your editor, make a new image and fill a row of 21 rectangles with greys from 0 to 255 in equal steps of about 12 or 13. Add a second row of fine shadow patches (0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30) and a third of fine highlight patches (230, 235, 240, 245, 250, 255). Keep every patch equal in red, green and blue.
2. Print it on the paper you plan to use, with exactly the settings you intend for real prints: the same mode, profile and quality.
3. Let it dry. Inkjet prints often darken slightly as they dry, and the tint can shift. Wait at least an hour, ideally overnight, before judging.
4. Read it under good light. Find the first shadow patch you can clearly tell apart from pure black, and the last highlight patch you can tell apart from paper white. Note both numbers.
5. Check neutrality. Look along the main row for any colour shift, especially in the middle greys, and note whether it changes from shadows to highlights.

If, for example, patches 0, 5 and 10 all look identical, anything in your file darker than about 12 will print as solid black. Before printing an image with important shadow detail, use a curve to lift those tones just above that limit.

Soft proofing and judging the print under the right light

Soft proofing uses the profile for your printer and paper to show, on screen, an approximation of how the print will look. With paper colour and black ink simulation turned on, the preview typically looks flatter and a little dimmer, because that is honestly what paper does to an image. That is useful: you can raise contrast or lift shadows until the proof looks right, rather than discovering the flatness after printing.

Soft proofing only works on an accurate screen. The most common complaint in printing, “my prints come out too dark”, is usually caused by a monitor that is far brighter than the light used to view prints. For print work, many photographers calibrate their display to a much lower brightness than the default, commonly somewhere around 80 to 120 candelas per square metre. Monitor calibration covers how to set this.

Then judge the physical print properly:

• Use consistent, bright, neutral light. A daylight-balanced lamp with high colour rendering, around 5000 K, is the common standard for evaluating prints. Dim or very warm light makes every print look dark and muddy.
• Also check it under the light where it will hang. This is where metamerism shows itself. If a grey shifts noticeably between your viewing lamp and the room, a monochrome print mode or a different paper may be the fix.

The wider workflow of profiles and proofing is covered in colour management, and getting great colour in prints covers the same principles for colour work.

Print size, resolution and sharpening for monochrome

Black and white images are often all about texture: bark, stone, skin, grain, water. That makes resolution and sharpening especially visible.

• Resolution. Around 300 pixels per inch at the final print size is a common target for prints viewed up close. Large prints viewed from across a room can go lower without visible loss, because viewing distance grows with print size. The print size calculator does the arithmetic, and DPI vs PPI explains the difference between file and printer resolution.
• Resize first, sharpen last. Resize to the exact print dimensions, then apply output sharpening as the final step. Sharpening before resizing gets scaled along with the image and loses its effect or exaggerates halos.
• Sharpen for the paper. Ink spreads more on matte paper than on glossy, softening edges, so matte usually needs a little more output sharpening than lustre or gloss.
• Judge sharpening on paper, not screen. The right amount for print often looks slightly crunchy on screen at full magnification. Make a small test crop of a detailed area and print that before the full sheet.

Common mistakes

• Printing black and white through a plain colour path without checking neutrality. Casts and crossover appear. Fix: use a monochrome or grey-ink mode if you have one, or sample your file and test-print a step wedge first.
• Editing on a monitor that is too bright. Prints come out dark. Fix: calibrate to a lower brightness for print work and soft proof before printing.
• Trusting shadow detail that the paper cannot reproduce. Dark areas block up into solid black. Fix: find your paper’s shadow limit with a step wedge and lift important shadow tones above it.
• Heavy toning that looked good on screen. On paper it looks like a colour error. Fix: tone until visible, then halve it.
• Judging a wet print. Tones and tint change as ink dries. Fix: wait at least an hour, ideally overnight, before making corrections.

Try this

In about 30 minutes, find the real limits of your printing setup. Build the step wedge file described above, and next to it place a small crop of one of your own black and white photos that has both deep shadows and bright highlights. Print the sheet on the paper you use most, in your printer’s monochrome mode if it has one (or send it to your lab’s black and white service). Let it dry. Under a bright, neutral lamp, note the first distinguishable shadow patch, the last distinguishable highlight patch and any tint in the middle greys. Then carry the sheet to the room where you would hang a print and look again. Write the shadow and highlight numbers on the back of the sheet; those numbers are the target range for every print you make on that paper.

Frequently asked questions

Should I convert my file to greyscale before printing?

Not necessarily. Many printers and labs work best with an RGB file whose three channels are equal. Convert to greyscale only if your lab asks for it or your printer’s monochrome mode requires it, and do it as the last step after editing.

Why does my black and white print look green or magenta?

Usually because the printer is building grey from colour inks and the balance is slightly off, or because the print is being viewed under a light that reveals metamerism. A monochrome print mode, the correct paper profile or a lab with a true black and white process usually solves it.

Can I print black and white well on an ordinary colour printer?

Yes, with care. Use the correct paper profile, make sure your file is neutral, and print a step wedge to check for tints. Results may shift more between light sources than prints made with grey inks.

Related guides

• Black and White Photography: shooting and converting images that are worth printing.
• How to Print Photos at Home: printers, inks, papers and a full home printing workflow.
• How to Prepare Photos for Printing: sizing, export settings and file formats.
• Photography Color Management: profiles and proofing from screen to paper.
• Canvas Prints vs Photo Paper: how different print media change the look of an image.
• How to Get Great Color When Making Prints: the colour side of the same printing principles.
• Split Toning: adding controlled tones to highlights and shadows.