Black Point Editions
To the Chicago photographic community, there’s a big one in town. Yes indeed, we now offer 64 inch printing! Our printer is not a signage printer like other grand-format inkjets on the market. It is a true 2880dpi, 9-channel, 3.5 picoliter, variable-droplet, on-the-fly matte and photo black printer produced to perfection by Epson. We have it all profiled for both Advanced Black and White and color for most in-house papers. Epson hasn’t shipped its 60” Premium Semi-gloss paper yet so we are experimenting with other papers and will have a 60” RC-based paper up and ready to go within the week!
We would like to give a big shout-out to Jim Doyle and Shades of Paper for selling us the printer. He’s the best paper seller in the US. He knows his stuff when it comes to fine-art paper and he’s provided our company with prompt shipping and excellent service for years now.
Many people today use Epson’s Advanced Black and White printing workflow with their new ’800 series printers. We have two of these printers in-house, the 3800 and the 11880. Both of these printers are exceptional and we’ve built gray-scale ICC profiles to work with the Advanced Black and White option. What this does is Linearize the Advanced Black and White to give you exact shadow detail and a perfect tonal scale from shadow to highlight. We do it because it lets us proof on the 3800 for the 11880. This way both printers will print exactly the same.
Here are the ICC profiles.
When you print with preview in Photoshop, make sure to select the profile with a rendering intent of Perceptual with Black Point Compensation on. Your Shadow Mid-tone and Highlight settings should all be at zero and your tonality setting should be set to “Dark”. Your hue can be set to whatever you want it to be. We build the profiles at a hue setting of 0,0.
Download the files below and enjoy.
Epson 3800 for Crane Portfolio Rag Advanced Black and White
Epson 3800 for Hahnemuhle Pearl Advanced Black and White
Epson 3800 for Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Advanced Black and White
Epson 11880 for Crane Portfolio Rag Advanced Black and White
Epson 11880 for Premium Luster Advanced Black and White
Epson 11880 for Premium Semi-gloss Advanced Black and White
Epson 11880 for Hahnemuhle Pearl Advanced Black and White
Epson 11880 for Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Advanced Black and White
Printer Settings:
For Matte-surface papers use the Velvet Fine Art printer setting. For gloss papers use either the pre-defined Epson printer setting or a default of Epson Premium Luster.
If you would like to get a grayscale ICC profile for your own particular ABW printer, please download the swatch file in our downloads section (to the right) and mail the swatch to our Vermont location with instructions. We will read the strip and email you an ICC profile.
To all those out there who don’t know, we now offer wet-process drum scanning up to 11,000 optical DPI. We also scan 8×10 originals. Check out our Price sheet for the specifics. For the DPI that we are pulling by default we are WAY under the price of our competition. We also offer free FTP downloads of your files. You can get more details about the FTP in the services section.
As you know, Walker Blackwell has moved to Vermont. He’s set a up a studio there as a “franchise” of Black Point Editions on the east coast. Check him out at vermont.blackpointeditions.com! He is doing entirely black and white printing for now. Black Point Editions in Chicago is still fully capable for true BW work with a Neutral K7 9600 printer.
We are now at 1739 South Halsted Street, Apartment 2F, Chicago, IL 60608. Our phone number is still the same. The location is only 1 1/2 block north of our old location. We will put a sign up on the 1932 S Halsted building with new directions.
Emails will be sent shortly. Take care all, Walker Blackwell and Nathan Baker.