Light and shade: tips for printing black and white landscapes

Clive Booth is best known for his commercial and fashion work but the dramatic landscape of England's Peak District where he lives, and time spent on the beautiful Isle of Islay off the west coast of Scotland, has inspired a passion for black and white landscape photography as well. Indeed, a Paris exhibition of his Islay landscapes led to a major assignment for Ardbeg, a whisky brand owned by LVMH with a distillery on the island. Much of the work involved capturing Islay's wild mystery through atmospheric black and white landscapes.

Clive is equally passionate about printing black and white images. "My background is in graphic design and I've worked on the back of printing presses for 30 years," he explains. "I love print, and I love printing black and white landscapes. With the right subject matter and atmospheric conditions, an image can have so many levels. You can reveal so much finery in the detail, and in the highlights and shadows, with soft gradations through the tones."

Here, the Canon Ambassador shares his experience of black and white printing, and offers advice and tips for getting the best results. While Suhaib Hussain, EMEA Product Marketing Manager at Canon Europe, explains the technical details that enable Canon's professional photo printers to produce the highest quality prints.

"When shooting, you're looking at getting the absolute best out of the camera," explains Clive. "Right now, the Canon EOS R5 and EOS R6 are world-beating cameras. When it comes to optics, the same goes for Canon's RF mount lenses. I always shoot in RAW or Dual Pixel RAW – that way you can extract the most from an image file. Canon's latest cameras give phenomenal dynamic range and you can retain incredible detail, from really dark lowlights to really bright highlights, with amazing tonal definition."

Clive uses the imagePROGRAF PRO-1000 printer for prints up to A2 size, the imagePROGRAF PRO-2000 for larger A0 prints, and he's now also using the newer imagePROGRAF PRO-300 (A3+) model. "The imagePROGRAF PRO-300 is an affordable yet incredibly capable printer – it's the most capable printer I've seen for its size," he says. "It prints as well as the other printers I've got, in some ways even better. The richness in the blacks is phenomenal."

"Even though the monitor is projected light and the print is reflected light, the soft proofing tools in PPL give you a really accurate preview of how your image will look when printed on a wide range of Canon photo papers and fine art media, as well as on specialist papers from independent manufacturers. Top-quality paper is expensive, so it helps you to get the results you want without wasting time and money. The consistency is superb as well – I know that if I edit my images for the results I want on the imagePROGRAF printers I use in my studio, I can send them anywhere in the world and, if they're printed on the same printers with the same paper, the results will be identical."

"Another really useful thing about PPL is its Pattern print function. At the hard proofing stage, this enables you to create thumbnails of your file with variations in brightness, contrast and tone. It's like creating a contact sheet, so you can choose your favourite version before creating the big print. If you're confident in your monitor's accuracy, you can even use the Pattern print option when soft proofing, so you can preview the differences on screen."

PPL has a dedicated black and white photo print mode for minimising colour casts in black and white landscapes. If you don't have the luxury of a high-end monitor and a fully-calibrated workflow, it can help to ensure excellent results. "The black and white photo mode reduces the amount of colour introduced into the print, to make up the tones that can't be replicated by the black and grey inks alone," explains Suhaib. "It uses a specially developed algorithm to generate a neutral print, by only using the lighter photo cyan and photo magenta inks in addition to the printer's black and grey inks. It's a quick and easy way of avoiding colour casts."

The quality of the print has a lot to do with the quality of the paper. Clive says Canon's latest fine art and premium matte papers are exceptional, but he also loves Hahnemühle papers. "Different papers can give you a different look and feel and it's really easy to switch between them. You can buy different Canon papers, select the relevant paper in the printing dialog box, and the software does everything else for you. You can create archival-quality prints from home, to the highest possible level, using the imagePROGRAF PRO-300. What's previously only been possible with large-footprint printers is now achievable with a machine that is small enough and affordable enough for any photographer to use."

Suhaib agrees that monochrome printing is about paper as well as inks. "The white level of the paper will affect the look of the print, similar to how white balance affects a digital image," he explains. "Matte papers tend to be a lot more muted – the whites are softer, so prints might look warmer than on screen. We'd always recommend using a calibrated workflow, and making use of colour profiling, and soft and hard proofing, to determine how the screen image will look in the final print on a specific type of paper."

A big advantage of the latest Canon imagePROGRAF printers and the Canon PIXMA PRO-200 is that they can output borderless photo prints on matte and fine art media, as well as on glossy paper. This enables you to use the whole of the media for edge-to-edge printing, upsizing your prints. "You're also not just limited to, say, 13x19-inch prints," explains Clive. "You can use different lengths of paper to best suit the aspect ratio of the image, from square to panoramic sizes."

"There's a strong archival element to photo printing," says Clive. "I've got hard drives that I have to plug into computers that are 20 years old, just to access the files. What's going to happen in another 50 years? All of the Canon printers, all of the Canon inks and all of the Canon papers can generate prints that will last for more than 150 years, so there's a big argument that printing is the best way of archiving your work. The other thing is that everybody's screen is different. As a photographer, making a print is the best way to show off your work in the way you want it to be seen. Print is all about craft, it's about quality, about passion, and about value. But it's also about archival quality and longevity."