By Amadou Diallo
Chapters:
Chapter 1 Image gallery
Chapter 2 Building the digital darkroom
Chapter 3 Color management for the Black-and-white photographer
Chapter 4 Digital capture
Chapter 5 Photoshop in black and white
Chapter 6 Black-and-white inkjet printing
Chapter 7 The imaging workflow
Chapter 8 The limited edition
Chapter 9 The portfolio
The book provides a decent overview of the differnet methods available today for printing black and white inkjet prints. Methods covered are using a standard color inkset as well as using non-OEM black and white inksets such as
Jon Cone's Piezography and
MIS Ultratone inksets. Major players Epson, Canon and HP are covered.
There is a very useful section on layer blend modes. I thought this was the best section of the book as I have never seen a Photoshop book clearly explain how the blend modes work. Diallo does a good job of explaining the blend modes with visual references. This section alone may be worth the price of the book.
The color management section goes over the tools for profiling monitor and printer, but that's about it. It doesn't really show you specifically how to do the steps as they apply to using a black and white inkset (neither does any of the hardware/software I use for that matter.) The reader is left to figure it out on their own. It's pretty much the same with the printing section. It goes over the print drivers that Canon, Epson and HP include with their printers. Nothing a user couldn't figure out from the OEM manual or online forum help. This book really isn't an instruction manual. At the end of it all, it's still trial and error for me. Nothing in this book helped me move away from that.
Unfortunately for the book, technology changes very quickly in the digital imaging world. This book is written specifically to certain manufacturers and product lines that will continue to change and as a result, many sections of this book will be out of date in a couple of years. (Somehow, I find this ironic. There are many "old" books written on film-based black and white photography that are still relevant and applicable...) I was expecting a book with more nuts and bolts on the aspect of black and white inkjet printing (as one might think from the title of the book.) I think a good book or two on Photoshop (or whatever your image editing software choice is) and a book or two on color management would be a better choice. Overall, I feel like the book tries to be too much. Instead of concentrating on the printing aspect, it covers many other topics as indicated by the index.
For the enthusiast who likes to read everything on the subject of their passion, I can suggest "High Quality Black-and-White Imaging and Printing" by Amadou Diallo.
