Piezography®

The ultimate quality for black and white prints. It is the only system capable of printing tens of thousands of gray levels, because it makes use of a multi-shade of gray inks, making it a perfect accompaniment to 16 bits raw photography.

The IMAGE PRINT CENTRE was the first lab in the UK to produce large format prints using Piezography Pro system from digital files.

Using an Epson inkjet printer loaded with monochrome inks developed in the United State, Piezography is the finest black and white digital printing system with a special printer driver.

The system functions with 8 inks + one polish (3 inks with warm tones and 3 inks with cool tones, a matte black one and a glossy black one. Which means that the print is done on a base of 8 inks of varying shades of grey. This new process allows us to have darker blacks on matte or satin paper thanks to a new black ink formula that absorbs light. This matte black ink is to this day the most dense ink in the world, also creating a substantially smoother latitude, and sharply increasing shadow and highlight detail with excellent preservation.

It makes the highest-quality fine-art monochrome prints in the world. With the industry’s best dMax, highest resolving fidelity, visually balanced toning options, and most uniform gloss, our Piezography Pro system has it all.

It is absolutely nothing like anything else you ever seen before.

Piezography Glossy – allowing a beautiful finish which is absolutely similar to the baryta-based gelatin silver print.

Piezography Matte – reproducing the sense of depth and the texture of the image.

What is Piezography.

Piezography is a brand of monochromatic inks and software that produce what is unarguably the absolute highest-standard in black and white printing.

It’s primary purpose is printing black & white photographs with carbon. Today, it is a fully mature and developed product with benefits that remain the target of past and current OEMs. It’s a notch well above current OEM systems and sets a level of its own.

One of the benefits of the Piezography proprietary media profiles is to double the optical resolution of the printer. They also produce more printable locations for microdots allowing a substantially smoother tonal lattitude. Combined with up to 7 shades of carbon ink, these proprietary media profiles produce greater acuity and detail, smoother skin tones, increased shadow and highlight detail, and substantially more gray levels than the Epson ABW system. Piezography is the only system capable of printing tens of thousands of gray levels making it a perfect accompaniement to 16 bit raw photography.

The Piezography system is totally democratic. An iPhonographer can make extraordinary 20x24 prints with a Piezography system. Owners of the new high resolution cameras, and those investing in Leica sensors will finally see the gains that these investments in gear can produce. The plain fact is that Piezography squeezes the best out of any digital camera. When film is scanned, a much greater tonal lattitude can be printed than in the darkroom. When used to make digital negatives, Piezography emulates tradtional film without any of the digital artifacts associated with making inkjet film.

The final proof is always in the printing. The most striking characteristic of a Piezography print is produced from the increased load of high quality carbon pigment being printed. The dMax will pick up nearly a full stop as it dries. The quality and preparation of the carbon printed in a thick emulsion on the fine art matte printmaking paper produces an effect not unlike light reflecting off the dust of a butterflies wings. Piezography when printed on fine art baryta surfaces eliminates all gloss differential and bronzing.

Multi-tone inks

Our Epson SureColor SC-P8000 44” printer contains 7 shades of B&W inks, with a mixture of neutral, warm tone and cool tone and a gloss overcoat for darkroom style photo papers. These finely balanced ink hues make neutral when combined together at certain percentagens enabling very creative control of the warm, neutral, and cool axis. Up to one million unique combinations can be achieved all from a single printer.

Compatible Papers

Piezography has a great compatibility with most of the best paper available on the market today, insuring the best combination between inks, paper, reproduction and longevity.

See below the compatible paper by brand:

Hahnemuhle: PhotoRAG*, Bamboo, PhotoRAG Pearl, Photo Silk Baryta, Fineart Baryta*, William Turner, German Etching* and Museum Etching.

Epson: Ultra Premium Glossy, Ultra Premium Lustre, Ultra Premium Semimatte, Exhibition Fibre, Hot Press Bright and Hot Press Natural.

Canson: RAG Photographique, Platine, Aquarelle*, Baryta Photographique, Printmaking RAG and Edition Etching.

Awagami: Bamboo, Bizan and Kozo

*Always in stock.

File Requirements

This print process requires greyscale images saved in a colour space with a gamma of 2.2. Colour spaces such as sRGB and Adobe RGB(1998) are both spaces with a gamma of 2.2 and will convert to greyscale without any change in tonal balalnce. The esiest way to convert your image is in Photoshop. To do this is open your image in Photoshop, go to the Edit menu and select Convert to Profile... Use the settings shown.

You can save your image as JPEG or as TIFF.

When saving as JPEG use the highest quality setting available. When saving as a TIFF file (preferable), the highest quality will be preserved with no degradation to any image tones. This is the prefered option for the highest quality prints.

If you are not confident in converting your image to greeyscale, send us your image and we can make the conversion for you.

Print Sizes Available

Our Epson SureColour SC-P8000 printer loaded with 7 shades of grey inks can produce prints up to 44” on the shortest side, that is enough to get you the most impressive B0+ (1118 x 1580 mm or 44 x 62.2 inches) size black and white prints available in the world.

Prices

Please notice that we only offer 100% neutral or the lovely 20% Warm, 80% Neutral, 0% Cool recipe for on-line service. For custom split tones recipes, please choose premium service.