Commercial options for having a digital file printed in "true" black and white?

Nitroplait · Sep 9, 2025

I practice photography in the analog domain and do my own darkroom development and printing. I know very little about printing digital BW files and hope to get a few pointers from those crossing the domain line.

I have a digital BW file which I would like to print. I'd like it to be archival and true monochrome, as close to a B&W fiber based print as possible (not an inkjet print composed of colors that tries to resemble grey scale nor a BW print on color RC paper).

I'd like to send it out to a professional service, but struggle for a vocabulary to describe my requirements.

What service should I search for? what process or technology is common today for printing pure greyscale photographs from digital files?

Any recommended companies that will do above? (I am in the EU)

Thanks.

dokko · Sep 9, 2025

you'll want a provider that can expose on true b/w photo paper.
the machine are usually Lightjet or Lambda, the paper is normal B/W paper which gets developed chemically as usual. Barita is often used as a term for fiber base paper.

so look or a place that still runs b/w paper workflow.

I usually use white wall. they are an automated web service, so very affordable and the quality is very good (although they oversharpen by default, so my advice would be not to pre-sharpen your image)

Baryta B&W Photo Print | WhiteWall

Top Quality B&W Photo Prints on Baryta Paper ➤ Classic Baryta Paper ✓ Laser Exposure ⭐Voted BEST PHOTO LAB WORLDWIDE ➤ Create Now!

www.whitewall.com

Ilford B&W Photo Print | WhiteWall

Custom B&W Photo Prints on Ilford Paper ➤ Cutting-Edge Laser Exposure ✓ Traditional Development ⭐Voted BEST PHOTO LAB WORLDWIDE ➤ Create Now!

www.whitewall.com

a dedicated professional lab can give a bit better quality if you happen to catch a good one, or worse if you come across a bad one.
they are significantly more expensive since they provide human custom service.

Nitroplait · Sep 9, 2025

Thanks @dokko ! That is very helpful.

cirwin2010 · Sep 9, 2025

You can also look for shops that produce prints using Piezography inks. Basically inkjet printers converted to use only black and grey carbon inks. Probably about as archival as it gets for a digital print. I converted an Epson 3880 to use Piezography inks. Using Hahnemuhle fine art baryta paper with this process has produced results that are the closest I've seen to darkroom fiber based paper.

bdial · Sep 9, 2025

Another approach would be to create a digital negative on a transparency film, then contact print it to photographic paper. Either on your own, or using a service.
This is a very common approach for making alt-process prints.

Carnie Bob · Sep 9, 2025

I see you are in Europe, Picto Paris or Metro in London make silver gelatin prints off digital files with their Durst Lambda. As well a calibrated inkjet negative
can be produced and contacted onto paper.
I use to own a Lambda but now prefer this option of manking a negative and then printing via contact onto any paper or process I want. - Durst Lambda printers are limited to the choice of papers available, but if you are looking for a true black and white print then this would be the way to go.

Alan9940 · Sep 9, 2025

Carnie Bob said:
I use to own a Lambda but now prefer this option of manking a negative and then printing via contact onto any paper or process I want. - Durst Lambda printers are limited to the choice of papers available, but if you are looking for a true black and white print then this would be the way to go.

Bob,

Have you written an article or something on how you craft digital negatives for silver gelatin printing? Though I've made digital negatives for pt/pd printing for many years, I could never seem to get a digital negative to produce a decent silver gelatin print. The biggest issue I had was that I could see the dots; even though I printed the negative on Pictorico on my Epson 3880 at its highest resolution.

GregY · Sep 9, 2025

Carnie Bob said:
I see you are in Europe, Picto Paris or Metro in London make silver gelatin prints off digital files with their Durst Lambda. As well a calibrated inkjet negative
can be produced and contacted onto paper.
I use to own a Lambda but now prefer this option of manking a negative and then printing via contact onto any paper or process I want. - Durst Lambda printers are limited to the choice of papers available, but if you are looking for a true black and white print then this would be the way to go.

Bob, Have you overcome the banding problems in printing digital negatives...as several negatives i got from you suffered from that problem.

Carnie Bob · Sep 9, 2025

GregY said:
Bob, Have you overcome the banding problems in printing digital negatives...as several negatives i got from you suffered from that problem.

there is an old saying garbage in garbage out... your work was the only banding issue we had in years. We actually stopped sending out film to end users
because of this uncertainty and are not willing to trouble shoot client files.

GregY · Sep 9, 2025

Carnie Bob said:
there is an old saying garbage in garbage out... your work was the only banding issue we had in years.

Whatever you want to believe Bob..... you said yourself it was a printing artifact....& not in the neg scans..,..
I was asking an honest question, since contact printing produces good results from disparate media.

Pieter12 · Sep 9, 2025

Cone editions piezography: https://www.cone-editions.com/piezography

Carnie Bob · Sep 9, 2025

GregY said:
Whatever you want to believe Bob..... you said yourself it was a printing artifact....& not in the neg scans..,..
I was asking an honest question, since contact printing produces good results from disparate media.

digital artifacting manifests itself in many ways, after doing thousands of prints of our own using our original scans and files we happen to know that sometimes banding will happen and in all the cases we have seen its because of digital work done before we get the file.

Pieter12 · Sep 9, 2025

Alan9940 said:
Bob,

Have you written an article or something on how you craft digital negatives for silver gelatin printing? Though I've made digital negatives for pt/pd printing for many years, I could never seem to get a digital negative to produce a decent silver gelatin print. The biggest issue I had was that I could see the dots; even though I printed the negative on Pictorico on my Epson 3880 at its highest resolution.

There's always LVT film negatives, though not many suppliers.

GregY · Sep 9, 2025

Carnie Bob said:
digital artifacting manifests itself in many ways, after doing thousands of prints of our own using our original scans and files we happen to know that sometimes banding will happen and in all the cases we have seen its because of digital work done before we get the file.

Thanks for the answer.

Carnie Bob · Sep 9, 2025

Alan9940 said:
Bob,

Have you written an article or something on how you craft digital negatives for silver gelatin printing? Though I've made digital negatives for pt/pd printing for many years, I could never seem to get a digital negative to produce a decent silver gelatin print. The biggest issue I had was that I could see the dots; even though I printed the negative on Pictorico on my Epson 3880 at its highest resolution.

No I have not, as there are too many issues to overcome when doing this and right now I am busy with printing, a book is a massive undertaking.

Carnie Bob · Sep 9, 2025

Pieter12 said:
There's always LVT film negatives, though not many suppliers.

Griffin Editions in NY provide this I believe as well as lambda fibre and optical fibre prints.

koraks · Sep 9, 2025

GregY said:
overcome the banding problems in printing digital negatives

This is not about @Bob Carnie's negatives, but I have run into this issue as have other printers. One trick Kees Brandenburg mentioned to me not too long ago is to use two identical negatives, one rotated by 90 degrees prior to outputting to the inkjet printer. The result is that the banding is at an angle in both negatives, which results in a much less noticeable cross-hatched pattern that can even go entirely unnoticed.

Alan9940 said:
Though I've made digital negatives for pt/pd printing for many years, I could never seem to get a digital negative to produce a decent silver gelatin print. The biggest issue I had was that I could see the dots; even though I printed the negative on Pictorico on my Epson 3880 at its highest resolution.

Same here, also with the 3880. I've to date not come across any convincing technique or physical example that completely avoids this issue while at the same time maintaining the same kind of excellent fine detail rendering you get with in-camera negatives. The results can be pretty good especially if you keep a certain distance from the print. As such, it's much less of an issue with bigger prints as the viewing distance will be larger anyway, so you can (sort of, within certain limits) get away with some imperfections.

Imagesetter negatives have better potential, but sadly, they're a bit of a dead-end street with this technology being very firmly on its way out.

For a truly high quality B&W silver halide output I think the option offered by @dokko is really the way to go. Inspection of the prints under high magnification will show a 'digital pixel pattern', but this should be entirely invisible to the naked eye, even at close distance, so it's arguably irrelevant.

dokko · Sep 9, 2025

koraks said:
Inspection of the prints under high magnification will show a 'digital pixel pattern', but this should be entirely invisible to the naked eye, even at close distance, so it's arguably irrelevant.

I've never inspected those prints under a loupe, but I've run many tests and by naked eye I've never seen any pixel pattern, no matter how closely I looked.

If there is a pixel pattern on print on these machines, then most likely the scan wasn't very good.

koraks · Sep 9, 2025

dokko said:
I've never inspected those prints under a loupe

That's what I'm explicitly referring to.

dokko said:
If there is a pixel pattern on print on these machines, then most likely the scan wasn't very good.

Scans have nothing to do with this, sorry.

foc · Sep 9, 2025

There is the Harman Lab in UK .

https://harmanlab.com/collections/digital-silver-black-and-white-prints

nikos79 · Sep 10, 2025

I was wondering something similar. I like to make books online with Black and White photos, but unfortunately almost all labs that offer that service (including book binding) do not use dedicated monochromatic inkjet printers.
As a result the photos tend to appear "muted" and slightly "tinted" even after doing the best you can with Soft Proof.

For reference I have used Saal Digital for my book prints. Generally, they are very good, with the limitations of course mentioned above with their use of RGB printers

koraks · Sep 10, 2025

nikos79 said:
almost all labs that offer that service (including book binding) do not use dedicated monochromatic inkjet printers.

I doubt that this is what you'd want. There are print-on-demand inkjet presses that are pure monochromatic, but the print quality of these is generally pretty poor. Btw, also the 'full color' CMYK inkjet presses for stuff like Amazon's POD books don't yield acceptable (for our purposes) photo quality. It basically looks like you've rattled off your photos on a 1990s HP DeskJet printer.

The problem with 'monochromatic' is also that it doesn't guarantee pure monochromacity. Compare a couple of different samples of what at first glance looks like pure monochrome prints and marvel at the rainbow of hues. Mind you, this isn't necessarily a problem. Toning can be (and often is) desirable. The problem is mostly that you'd want to control it, and that everyone has a different preference for their images. This complicates matters greatly.

Note that the monochrome conversions of multi-channel inkjet mentioned earlier (e.g. Piezography) are also not necessarily designed to produce true monochromacity; in fact, they're optimized to allow for a range of toning options.

nikos79 said:
their use of RGB printers

Saal uses chromogenic color for their lay-flat books. This is a decent way of making color or monochrome books at reasonable cost, but it's far from ideal for various reasons, especially for monochrome work. As you imply in the quote above, the main issue is that color chromogenic paper just isn't a monochromatic medium. It renders color by mixing CMY in a balanced way. With proper calibration, you can get really, really close to neutral - and of course get any toning you like by shifting any of the channels away from neutral. Other issues with this approach are the inherent tendency towards mottling of blacks or solid dark hues, and the limited range of surface finishes which =ranges from a silk-like gloss to a 'plastic' sheen - ultimately, it's all RC paper, so you're never going to get anything resembling either a true flat matte finish or the subtly textured finish of a baryta print.

For a one-off book or a small edition, at this point in time you're probably better off with an inkjet option that offers decent print quality. But it'll be somewhat specialized, since demand is mostly for full color prints, so that's where all the investments are.

nikos79 · Sep 10, 2025

koraks said:
For a one-off book or a small edition, at this point in time you're probably better off with an inkjet option that offers decent print quality. But it'll be somewhat specialized, since demand is mostly for full color prints, so that's where all the investments are.

Thanks for an extensive explanation, I am not much familiar with these processes.
Would you have any recommendations (Europe based)?

Carnie Bob · Sep 10, 2025

koraks said:
This is not about @Bob Carnie's negatives, but I have run into this issue as have other printers. One trick Kees Brandenburg mentioned to me not too long ago is to use two identical negatives, one rotated by 90 degrees prior to outputting to the inkjet printer. The result is that the banding is at an angle in both negatives, which results in a much less noticeable cross-hatched pattern that can even go entirely unnoticed.

Same here, also with the 3880. I've to date not come across any convincing technique or physical example that completely avoids this issue while at the same time maintaining the same kind of excellent fine detail rendering you get with in-camera negatives. The results can be pretty good especially if you keep a certain distance from the print. As such, it's much less of an issue with bigger prints as the viewing distance will be larger anyway, so you can (sort of, within certain limits) get away with some imperfections.

Imagesetter negatives have better potential, but sadly, they're a bit of a dead-end street with this technology being very firmly on its way out.

For a truly high quality B&W silver halide output I think the option offered by @dokko is really the way to go. Inspection of the prints under high magnification will show a 'digital pixel pattern', but this should be entirely invisible to the naked eye, even at close distance, so it's arguably irrelevant.

So a trick we have done to fix these files that when separated -create banding and or artifacts, -Very Old School trick.. we add noise to the whole image basically turning it into a stochastic image which seems to remove banding and artifacts IN MOST CASES NOT ALL.
The amount of noise is the trick , somewhat like when one flashes a print you find the point where you can see the density and you either hold or back off a smidge.

koraks · Sep 10, 2025

nikos79 said:
Would you have any recommendations (Europe based)?

For a book specifically, no, I'm afraid not.

Carnie Bob said:
So a trick we have done to fix these files that when separated -create banding and or artifacts, -Very Old School trick.. we add noise to the whole image basically turning it into a stochastic image which seems to remove banding and artifacts IN MOST CASES NOT ALL.

Yes, this can help. Which brings the issue of images printed from multiple halftone negatives, which usually involves different screen angles or screen types to avoid interference issues.

Commercial options for having a digital file printed in "true" black and white?

Nitroplait

dokko

Baryta B&W Photo Print | WhiteWall

Ilford B&W Photo Print | WhiteWall

Nitroplait

cirwin2010

bdial

Carnie Bob

Alan9940

GregY

Carnie Bob

GregY

Pieter12

Carnie Bob

Pieter12

GregY

Carnie Bob

Carnie Bob

koraks

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dokko

koraks

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foc

nikos79

koraks

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nikos79

Carnie Bob

koraks

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Commercial options for having a digital file printed in "true" black and white?

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